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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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#5651

Maurice Tweedie

#31619

Overall Influence

1919 - 1996 (77 years)

Maurice Charles Kenneth Tweedie was a British medical physicist and statistician from the University of Liverpool. He was known for research into the exponential family probability distributions. Education and career Tweedie read physics at the University of Reading and attained a BSc and BSc in physics in 1939 followed by a MSc in physics 1941. He found a career in radiation physics, but his primary interest was in mathematical statistics where his accomplishments far surpassed his academic postings.

#5652

Jain

#135711

Overall Influence

#5653

Matthias Vojta

#135744

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

#5654

Franz Josef Giessibl

#126815

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Franz Josef Gießibl is a German physicist and university professor at the University of Regensburg. Life Giessibl studied physics from 1982 to 1987 at the Technical University of Munich and at Eidgenössische Technischen Hochschule Zürich. He received a diploma in experimental physics in 1988 with Professor Gerhard Abstreiter and continued with a PhD in physics with Nobel Laureate Gerd Binnig at the IBM Physics Group Munich on atomic force microscopy. After submitting his PhD thesis in the end of 1991, he continued for 6 months as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the IBM Physics Group Munich and moved...

#5655

N. Asger Mortensen

#129497

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

N. Asger Mortensen is a Danish theoretical physicist who has made contributions to the fields of nanotechnology, including mesoscopic physics, nanofluidics, photonic-crystal fibers, slow light photonic crystals, and plasmonics. He is known for his contributions to understanding nonlocal light-matter interactions at the interface between classical electromagnetism and quantum physics.

#5656

M. Markina A. Vasiliev

#135783

Overall Influence

#5657

Leslie M. Loew

#135791

Overall Influence

#5658

Juan Carlos Campuzano

#71967

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Juan Carlos Campuzano is a Paraguayan American physicist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory , and a he is also a 2001 American Physical Society Fellow and a recipient of the 2011 Oliver Buckley Prize in Condensed Matter Physics. He is an expert in high-temperature superconductivity.

#5659

Wolfgang Kroll

#31470

Overall Influence

1906 - 1992 (86 years)

Wolfgang Kroll was a physicist, born in Greifswald, northern Germany, who received his doctorate in physics from the University of Breslau in 1930. He spent the next few years in Leipzig conducting postdoctoral research with Werner Heisenberg.

#5660

Charles Dennison Dermer

#135842

Overall Influence

#5661

Michael A. Lemp

#135854

Overall Influence

#5662

Jack. Washburn

#135882

Overall Influence

#5663

David Ian Olive

#135884

Overall Influence

#5664

Paul Michael Schenk

#135896

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

#5665

Torbjørn Digernes

#75355

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Torbjørn Digernes is a Norwegian physicist and Professor of marine systems design. He is a former Rector of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology He started as Rector from August 1, 2005. His successor is Gunnar Bovim who officially assumed the post 1 August 2013.

#5666

Ruth Grützbauch

#119205

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Ruth Grützbauch is an Austrian astronomer, planetarium director and science communicator. After earning her doctoral degree in 2007, she conducted extragalactic research until 2013, and worked as an educator and science communicator afterwards. Since 2017, she runs the Public Space pop-up planetarium.

#5667

Zhi-zhong Xing

#135932

Overall Influence

#5668

Thomas Peter

#135962

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

#5669

Hans‐jürgen Wester

#136002

Overall Influence

#5670

Jan Sijbers

#136021

Overall Influence

#5671

Erik Bakkers

#122690

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Erik Petrus Antonius Maria Bakkers is a professor at the physics departments of both the Eindhoven and Delft Universities of Technology. His research concentrates on the growth and properties of semiconducting nanowires, the use of wires for solar cells, thermoelectric devices, and quantum computation. He received his PhD from the Utrecht University with the thesis "Charge transfer between semiconductor nanocrystals and a metal", which was focused on charge transfer between quantum dots. He worked at Philips Research labs in Eindhoven for 9 years before moving back to academia. Bakkers recei...

#5672

Stergios Logothetidis

#116263

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Stergios Logothetidis is a Greek physicist and a full time professor at the solid-state physics department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the founder and director of the Lab for Thin Films – Nanosystems and Nanometrology . The scientific and research activities of LTFN are focused on the areas of: nanotechnology, organic electronics, nanomedicine, nano-bioelectronics and thin films.

#5673

Lyle Benjamin Borst

#97654

Overall Influence

1912 - 2002 (90 years)

Lyle Benjamin Borst was an American nuclear physicist and inventor. He worked with Enrico Fermi in Chicago, was involved with the Manhattan District Project, and worked with Ernest O. Wollan to conduct neutron scattering and neutron diffraction studies.

#5674

Kenneth Le Couteur

Kenneth Le Couteur

#105234

Overall Influence

1920 - 2011 (91 years)

Kenneth James Le Couteur was a British physicist who was the foundation Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Australian National University in Canberra. During World War II he worked at Bletchley Park as a codebreaker.

#5675

Walter Kutschera

#113446

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Walter Kutschera is an Austrian physicist. Biography Kutschera was born in Vienna, Austria in 1939. In 1965 he got his Ph.D. in experimental physics from the Austrian University of Graz. Starting from next year and for the whole 27 after, he was working in different institutions researching nuclear physics, majority of which had to do with tandem accelerators. In 1978 he taught Experimental physics at University of Tokyo in Tokyo, Japan for one year, followed by 14 years of work at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. In 1980 he focused his research on the study of isotope language. He became Senior Scientist in 1986, in the end of his teachings in Illinois.

#5676

Martin Barstow

#123894

Overall Influence

Martin Barstow is a Professor of Astrophysics and Space Science at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester and the former President of the Royal Astronomical Society. Research Barstow's research is on white dwarfs, the interstellar medium and UV instrumentation.

#5677

John T. Finch

#136073

Overall Influence

#5678

Bobby Samir Acharya

#136074

Overall Influence

#5679

Beat Keller

#136095

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

#5680

Peter Albert Wolff

#136122

Overall Influence

#5681

Måns Ehrenberg

#136143

Overall Influence

#5682

Hans A. Bachor

#126690

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Professor Hans-Albert Bachor is a German-born Australian research physicist. He was chairperson of the National Youth Science Forum in Australia, and is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Quantum Science, Research School of Physics at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

#5683

Jan Borgman

#94768

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Jan Borgman was a Dutch astronomer and university administrator. He was professor of astronomical observation technique at the University of Groningen from 1968 to 1988. During this period he served as rector magnificus from 1978 to 1981 and chair of the board of governors from 1981 to 1988. Borgman subsequently became chairperson of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

#5684

Carlos Jaschek

#88330

Overall Influence

1926 - 1999 (73 years)

Carlos Jaschek was a German-born Argentine astrophysicist who spent time in the United States, lived in Switzerland, settled in France, became a French citizen and worked to make astronomical data accessible to all nations. As the second Director of a new center in Strasbourg, France, designed to be a computerized repository for data about the stars, he was part of its early team who were determined, clearsighted decision-makers when its resources were limited.

#5685

Sarah Gallagher

#110782

Overall Influence

Sarah Connoran Gallagher is a professor of astronomy at the University of Western Ontario, where her research focuses on active galaxies, black holes and compact galaxy groups. From 2018 to 2022, she also served as Science Advisor to the Canadian Space Agency.

#5686

Rafael Malach

#136251

Overall Influence

#5687

Roop Mallik

#72777

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Roop Mallik is an Indian biophysicist who works on nanoscale molecular motor proteins that transport material such as viruses, mitochondria, endosomes etc. inside living cells. The motors, such as kinesin and dynein generate forces of pico-newton order to carry our various cellular processes namely cell division, vesicular transport, endocytosis, molecular tethering etc. His lab is working to understand how motor proteins help in degradation and clearance of pathogens, and also how these motors work inside the liver to maintain systemic lipid homeostasis in the animal. Mallik is currently a ...

#5688

Joost Businger

#115173

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (102 years)

Joost Alois Businger is a Dutch-American meteorologist. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Washington. Businger is best known for his work on atmospheric boundary layer . Career Businger was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, on 29 March 1924. He obtained his PhD in physics and meteorology from Utrecht University in 1954. As a PhD student he did research on turbulent transfer of heat, mass and momentum in the atmospheric surface layer. He came up with a similar concept around the same time as the Monin–Obukhov similarity theory was founded in the Soviet Union, with the two concepts varying slightly.

#5689

Robert Fosbury

#106713

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Robert Fosbury is currently an emeritus astronomer at the European Southern Observatory and an honorary professor at the Institute of Ophthalmology at UCL. He is an astronomer who worked for 26 years at the European Space Agency as part of ESA's collaboration with NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope project at ST-ECF. Based at the European Southern Observatory near Munich in Germany, Fosbury joined this initiative in 1985, more than 5 years before launch. During the latter part of this period, Bob served on NASA's Ad Hoc Science Working Group and ESA's Study Science Team as they developed ...

#5690

Arthur Kosowsky

#135865

Overall Influence

Arthur Kosowsky is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. Biography Arthur Kosowsky received his B.S. in physics in 1989 from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was an Arthur Holly Compton Fellow. In 1994, he received his Ph.D. in physics under the supervision of Michael Turner, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a NASA GSRP fellow. He then held positions as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and as assistant then associate professor at Rutgers, before moving to the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

#5691

Davide Silvano Achille Gaiotto

#136329

Overall Influence

#5692

Barbara Ercolano

#119169

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Barbara Ercolano is an Italian astrophysicist known for her work on interstellar dust, star formation, and protoplanetary disks. She is the Professor for Theoretical Astrophysics in the at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#5693

Jean-claude Lemaitre

#136360

Overall Influence

#5694

Werner Wegscheider

#136367

Overall Influence

#5695

Paul Ralph Woodward

#136376

Overall Influence

#5696

Philippe Chanson

#136401

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

#5697

Reinhard Hickel

#136405

Overall Influence

#5698

Astronomy

#136420

Overall Influence

#5699

Stefan Hüfner

#134179

Overall Influence

1935 - 2013 (78 years)

Stefan Hüfner was a German experimental physicist specialized in solid-state physics and photoemission spectroscopy. Education and career Hüfner studied mathematics and physics at the Goethe University of Frankfurt and the Technical University of Darmstadt. After graduating from 1960 to 1966, he was a scientific assistant at the Institute for Technical Physics at the TU Darmstadt. In 1963 he received his doctorate there, supervised by Karl-Heinz Hellwege. In 1966 he obtained habilitation in physics. He was a guest researcher at the Technical University of Munich and at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.Y., USA.

#5700

Joseph Michael Schechter

#136433

Overall Influence

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