Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#5151

John Love

#96269

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

John Love was a pioneer in the field of fibre optics, who co-authoring the widely used textbook Optical Waveguide Theory and was Emeritus Professor of guided wave photonics at Australian National University .

#5152

Manfred Sigrist

#128325

Overall Influence

#5153

Andersen

#128393

Overall Influence

#5154

Ann Hornschemeier

#103626

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Ann Hornschemeier is an American astronomer specializing in X-ray emission from X-ray binary populations. She is the Chief Scientist for the Physics of the Cosmos program at NASA. Career and research She chairs the NuSTAR Starburst and Local Group science working group, which observes seven nearby galaxies and uses high-energy X-rays to search for and take pictures of the densest, hottest and most energetic regions in the universe. At NASA, Hornschemeier researches high energy astrophysics and cosmology. She is involved in future research missions, including the ESA Athena mission due to launch in 2028.

#5155

Enid MacRobbie

#90949

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Enid Anne Campbell MacRobbie, is a Scottish plant scientist, Emeritus Professor of Plant Biophysics at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of Girton College. Her specialty is biophysics, with particular interests in ion fluxes and stomata.

#5156

Luigi Bolondi

#128430

Overall Influence

#5157

Barry Franklin Levine

#128437

Overall Influence

#5158

Karen Jean Meech

#84750

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Karen J. Meech is an American planetary astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaiʻi. Career Karen Meech specializes in planetary astronomy, in particular the study of distant comets and their relation to the early Solar System. She is also very active in professional-amateur collaboration and science teacher education and was the founder of the Towards Planetary Systems high-school teacher / student outreach program that helps educate science teachers in the Pacific islands. She received her PhD in Planetary Sciences in 1987 at the Massachusetts Institute of Techn...

#5159

Nitin Samarth

#128449

Overall Influence

#5160

Karl Lintner

#115030

Overall Influence

1917 - 2015 (98 years)

Karl Lintner was an Austrian nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he did research on the inelastic dispersion of fast neutrons in uranium. After the war, he taught and did nuclear research at the University of Vienna. He was a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

#5161

Rolf Hosemann

#47839

Overall Influence

1912 - 1994 (82 years)

Rolf Hosemann was a German physicist who laid the mathematical foundations for paracrystallinity. Education and career Hosemann was born in Rostock and studied at the University of Marburg and the University of Freiburg. In 1936, he received his doctorate in Freiburg. He had received the topic of his dissertation The Radioactivity of Samarium from his academic teacher George de Hevesy, who had to leave Germany in 1934 because of his Jewish descent. In 1939 he received his habilitation with a thesis on small-angle X-ray scattering on cellulose. In 1951 he became a research associate with Max v...

#5162

Hermann Lühr

#128566

Overall Influence

#5163

Costas N. Papanicolas

Costas N. Papanicolas

#86202

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Costas N. Papanicolas is a nuclear and particle physicist with over 35 years' experience as a researcher, an educator and a scientific administrator. He received his B.Sc. in physics and PhD in nuclear physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. His research interests are in the fields of hadronic physics, solar energy and energy policy.

#5164

Albrecht M. Kellerer

#128568

Overall Influence

#5165

John W. Humberston

#128584

Overall Influence

#5166

Michael Bach

#47535

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Michael Bach is a German scientist who researches ophthalmology, clinical electroencephalography, clinical electroretinography, visual acuity testing, and visual perception. Bach is the creator of website Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena, which began receiving over two million hits a day in 2005.

#5167

Randall M. Feenstra

#114309

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Randall M. Feenstra is a Canadian physicist. Feenstra completed a bachelor's degree in engineering physics at the University of British Columbia in 1978, followed by his master's and doctorate in applied physics at the California Institute of Technology. From 1982 to 1995 he was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Since 1995, he has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, where he conducts research in semiconductors.

#5168

Arnab Rai Choudhuri

#105332

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Arnab Rai Choudhuri is an Indian scientist working in the area of Astrophysical MHD, specially in context of solar magnetic cycle. Career He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in 1978 from the Presidency College under the University of Calcutta and his M.Sc degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He earned his Ph.D at the University of Chicago in 1985 working under the supervision of Professor E.N. Parker. For next two years till 1987 he did research at the High Altitude Observatory, Boulder, USA. In 1987, he joined the Physics Department of Indian Institute of S...

#5169

Henry S. Valk

#94744

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Henry S. Valk is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Valk attended George Washington University where he received his B.S. in physics in 1953 and M.S. in mathematics in 1954. He then earned his Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis in 1957. Before joining the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Valk was a professor of physics at the University of Nebraska.

#5170

C. A. Mac Kay

#128660

Overall Influence

#5171

Konstantin T. Matchev

#128680

Overall Influence

#5172

Ilya Nemenman

#72340

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Ilya Mark Nemenman is a theoretical physicist at Emory University, where he is a Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Physics and Biology. He is known for his studies of information processing in biological systems and for developing coarse-grained models of these systems. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "his contributions to theoretical biological physics, especially information processing in a variety of living systems, and for the development of coarse-grained modeling methods of such systems". He is a Simons Investigator and James S. McDonnell Foundation Complex Systems Scholar.

#5173

Eric R. Bittner

#82111

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Eric R. Bittner is a theoretical chemist, physicist, and distinguished professor of chemical physics at the University of Houston. Biography Bittner obtained his B.S. in chemistry and in physics from Valparaiso University in 1988. From 1988 to 1994 he worked with John C. Light at the University of Chicago and obtained his Ph.D. thesis in 1994 on Quantum Theories of Energy Exchange at the Gas-Surface Interface. Subsequently, he worked at the University of Texas at Austin until 1996 as postdoctoral fellow of the National Science Foundation, with Peter J. Rossky as his mentor. He was visiting scholar at Stanford University from 1995 to 1997, with Hans C.

#5174

Walter Lambrecht

#125343

Overall Influence

Walter R. L. Lambrecht is a Belgian physicist. Born in Aalst, Belgium, in 1955, Lambrecht attended the University of Ghent, where he earned a Lic. Sc. and a Dr. Sc. in 1977 and 1980, respectively. He is a professor at Case Western Reserve University. In 2002, Lambrecht was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, "[f]or his seminal contributions to a better understanding of the electronic structure and linear and nonlinear optical properties of semiconductors, in particular wide band gap semiconductors, chalcopyrites and rare-earth pnictides".

#5175

Ado Jorio

#128796

Overall Influence

#5176

Robin Bullough

#62172

Overall Influence

1929 - 2008 (79 years)

Robin K. Bullough was a British mathematical physicist known for his contributions to the theory of solitons, in particular for his role in the development of the theory of the optical soliton, now commonly used, for example, in the theory of trans-oceanic optical fibre communication theory, but first recognised in Bullough's work on ultra-short optical pulses. He is also known for deriving exact solutions to the nonlinear equations describing these solitons and for associated work on integrable systems, infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems , and the statistical mechanics for these systems.

#5177

Yuri Kovchegov

#115818

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Yuri Kovchegov is an American physicist. Biography Kovchegov obtained his bachelor's degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1993 and two years later got his master's from Columbia University following by Ph.D. in 1998 at the same place. From 1998 to 1999 he worked at the University of Minnesota as a postdoc and then became theoretical research associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory. From 2000 to 2004 he served as a research assistant professor at the University of Washington and then became Ohio State University's assistant professor in 2004 following by a promotion there to the associate professor in 2008.

#5178

Frederik Wenz

#128811

Overall Influence

#5179

Wolfgang Junge

#128817

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

#5180

Luciano Tesi

#93603

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Luciano Tesi is an Italian veterinarian, amateur astronomer, discoverer of many minor planets, and director of the San Marcello Pistoiese Observatory. In 1980, he founded the "Amateur Group of Pistoiese Mountain" . Later on, this resulted in the construction of the Pistoia Mountains Astronomical Observatory. As the director of the observatory, he has collaborated with many discoverers in following up near-Earth objects and in finding minor planets since 1994.

#5181

K. Kunaratnam

#58076

Overall Influence

1934 - 2015 (81 years)

Kanthia Kunaratnam was a Sri Lankan Tamil physicist, academic and former vice-chancellor of the University of Jaffna. Early life Kunaratnam joined the University of Ceylon, Colombo in 1954 and graduated in 1958 with a first class honours B.Sc. degree in physics.

#5182

Rita M. Sambruna

#97637

Overall Influence

Rita M. Sambruna Commander OMRI is an Italian-American astrophysicist and is the Deputy Director of the Astrophysics Science Division at National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center. From September 2022 to May 2023, she was the Acting Deputy Director of the Science Exploration Directorate at Goddard. Rita held the Clare Boothe Luce Professorship in Physics and Astronomy at George Mason University in 2000-2005.

#5183

Malcolm D. Shuster

#37316

Overall Influence

1943 - 2012 (69 years)

Malcolm D. Shuster was an American physicist and aerospace engineer, whose work contributed significantly to spacecraft attitude determination. In 1977 he joined the Attitude Systems Operation of the Computer Sciences Corporation in Silver Spring, Maryland, during which time he developed the QUaternion ESTimator algorithm for static attitude determination. He later, with F. Landis Markley, helped to develop the standard implementation of the Kalman filter used in spacecraft attitude estimation. During his career, he authored roughly fifty technical papers on subjects in physics and spacecraf...

#5184

Giorgio Sberveglieri

#128967

Overall Influence

#5185

Shun‐lien Chuang

#128985

Overall Influence

#5186

Sigrid Close

#100620

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Sigrid Close is a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. Her primary research interest is the space environment with particular focus on meteoroids, meteors, and orbital debris, and their interaction with spacecraft and spacecraft operations.

#5187

Sibylle Günter

#100198

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Sibylle Günter is a German theoretical physicist researching tokamak plasmas. Since February 2011, she has headed the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. In October 2015, she was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in recognition of her contribution to research.

#5188

Paolo Padovani

#124622

Overall Influence

Paolo Padovani is an Italian astronomer working at the European Southern Observatory, specializing in the study of Active galactic nuclei including the study of quasars and blazars, evolution and multifrequency studies and extragalactic backgrounds. In 2004 he and several other astronomers discovered 30 supermassive blackholes at the European Astrophysical Virtual Observatory using pioneering techniques.

#5189

Peter Franz Rogl

#129056

Overall Influence

#5190

Wolfgang J. Choyke

#129086

Overall Influence

#5191

Varadaraja V. Raman

Varadaraja V. Raman

#34960

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Varadaraja Venkata Raman is a professor emeritus of physics and humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has lectured and written on his Indian heritage and culture and has also authored books and articles on the intersection of science and religion. Raman has been a frequent guest on the PBS television series Closer to Truth.

#5192

Robert S. Averback

#129138

Overall Influence

#5193

Toh‐ming Lu

#129180

Overall Influence

#5194

Qi-wen Zhan

#129228

Overall Influence

#5195

Shigeru Sassa

#129243

Overall Influence

#5196

Zeʼev Lev

#98394

Overall Influence

1922 - 2004 (82 years)

Ze'ev Lev , was an Israeli physicist, Torah scholar, and founder of the Jerusalem College of Technology. After being educated in Europe, Canada and the U.S., and having lost his parents and sister in the Holocaust, he became one of Israel's leading scientists and educators.

#5197

Vincenzo Di Lazzaro

#129274

Overall Influence

#5198

Javier Llorca

#129315

Overall Influence

#5199

Dominik Marx

#129316

Overall Influence

#5200

David S. Wollan

#125852

Overall Influence

1937 - 2008 (71 years)

David S. Wollan was an American physicist and arms control specialist. Wollan was born in Massachusetts, attended Amherst College as an undergraduate physics major, and earned his Master's and Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

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