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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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#5951

Carole Ann Haswell

Carole Ann Haswell

#91457

Overall Influence

Carole Ann Haswell is a British astrophysicist and current Professor of Astrophysics and Head of Astronomy at the Open University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. She has been involved in the detection of several exoplanets, including Barnard's Star b.

#5952

Stephen Hyde

#104568

Overall Influence

Professor Stephen Timothy Hyde is an Australian scientist who was appointed Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2005. He is professor and also the ARC Federation Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics, Research School of Physics, at the Australian National University. He holds the Barry Ninham Chair of Natural Sciences.

#5953

R. Peter Rand

#140055

Overall Influence

#5954

Henriette Elvang

#122317

Overall Influence

Henriette D. Elvang is a Theoretical Particle Physicist and Professor at the University of Michigan. She works on quantum field theory and scattering processes. Education and early career Elvang studied physics at the University of Copenhagen. She earned her bachelor's degree in 1998 and her master's degree in 2001. Elvang moved to America for her graduate studies, earning a doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005. She worked on Young projection operators and charged, rotating black rings. Elvang also investigated Kaluza–Klein bubbles and their interactions with black holes.

#5955

Dragomir N. Neshev

#140068

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

#5956

William Richard Peltier

#51942

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

William Richard Peltier, Ph.D., D.Sc. , is university professor of physics at the University of Toronto. He is director of the Centre for Global Change Science , past principal investigator of the Polar Climate Stability Network , and the scientific director of Canada's largest supercomputer centre, SciNet . He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, of the American Geophysical Union, of the American Meteorological Society, and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters..

#5957

Giovanni Pacini

#140128

Overall Influence

#5958

John Louis Reno

#140131

Overall Influence

#5959

Masahiro Kawasaki

#140196

Overall Influence

#5960

Michael Brian Schulz

#140203

Overall Influence

#5961

Jun Akimitsu

#140210

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

#5962

Mohammad Khorrami

#107426

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Mohammad Khorrami, an Iranian mathematical physicist is professor of physics at Alzahra University, Tehran. Education Competing with over half a million applicants, Mohammad Khorrami ranked first in national university entrance exams of 1984 in Iran..

#5963

Leslie M. Klevay

#140249

Overall Influence

#5964

Hanno Essén

#99560

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Hanno Essén is an associate professor of theoretical physics and a lecturer at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and former chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society. He is mainly known internationally for his controversial defense of E-cat.

#5965

Carolus J. Schrijver

#140284

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

#5966

Stefano Panzeri

#140302

Overall Influence

#5967

George W. Flynn

#117768

Overall Influence

1938 - 2020 (82 years)

George W. Flynn was an American physical chemist and professor, known for his work in laser spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy. Early life and career In 1938, Flynn was born and raised in Hartford, CT. Following the death of his father while he was still in high school, he was admitted to Yale University on a full scholarship. As an undergraduate he worked on research in the laboratory of Julian Sturtevant in the chemistry department at Yale. He received his bachelor's degree in 1960 and went to Harvard University to pursue a doctorate in chemistry. His thesis was supervised jointly by E.

#5968

Boris Nemtsov

#20149

Overall Influence

1959 - 2015 (56 years)

Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov was a Russian physicist, liberal politician, and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. Early in his political career, he was involved in the introduction of reforms into the Russian post-Soviet economy. In the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, he was the first governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast . Later he worked in the government of Russia as Minister of Fuel and Energy , Vice Premier of Russia and Security Council member from 1997 to 1998. In 1998, he founded the Young Russia movement. In 1998, he co-founded the coalition group Right Cause and in 1999, he co-formed Union of Right Forces, an electoral bloc and subsequently a political party.

#5969

Myer Bloom

#95751

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

Myer Bloom, was a Canadian physicist, specializing in the theory and applications of Nuclear magnetic resonance. Education and career Bloom was born into a Jewish family in Montreal in 1928. After secondary education at Baron Byng High School, Bloom received in 1949 his B.S. and in 1950 his M.S. from McGill University. In 1954 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign under Charles Slichter with thesis Magnetic Induction in Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance. Bloom was supported by an NRC Travelling Postdoctoral Fellowship at Leiden University from 1954 to 1956. At...

#5970

Maurice S. Skolnick

#140381

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

#5971

Leo Blitz

#140386

Overall Influence

#5972

Harold Weitzner

#72359

Overall Influence

Harold Weitzner is an American applied mathematician and physicist whose primary research is plasma physics. He is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and has served as Director of the Magneto-Fluid Dynamics Division at Courant since 1981, succeeding Harold Grad. He has published over 120 research articles on the topics of plasma physics, magnetohydrodynamics, fluid mechanics, fractional equations and kinetics, and chaos.

#5973

Yoseph Bar-Cohen

#81820

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Yoseph Bar-Cohen is a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who specializes in electroactive materials and ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation , and is responsible for the Nondestructive Evaluation and Advance Actuators lab at JPL. Bar-Cohen is a fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering and the American Society for Nondestructive Testing .

#5974

Brian H. Brown

#72507

Overall Influence

Brian H. Brown is a medical physicist specialising in medical electronics. He is especially well known for his pioneering work with David C. Barber on electrical impedance tomography . He is also noted for his work on the recording and understanding of the electrical activity of the gut, the analysis of nerve action potentials, the use of electromyography to investigate and identify carriers of muscular dystropy and the development of aids for the profoundly deaf. More recently he has carried out research on the use of Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy to identify early cervical cancer.

#5975

Robert B. Meyer

#94889

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Robert Bruce Meyer is an American physicist and professor at Brandeis University. Meyer graduated from Harvard University in 1965 with a bachelor's degree and in 1970 with a doctoral degree with advisor David Turnbull and dissertation on effects of electromagnetic fields on the structure of liquid crystals. At Harvard, Meyer was a postdoctoral student and became in 1971 an assistant professor and in 1974 an associate professor. At Brandeis University he was appointed an associate professor in 1978 and a full professor in 1985.

#5976

Philip Arthur Nelson

#140468

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

#5977

Oskar Painter

#84838

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Oskar Painter is a Canadian born experimental physicist who works on nanoscale optics, nanomechanical devices, and superconducting qubits. He is the John G. Braun Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics at Caltech. Since 2019, he is also Head of Quantum Hardware at Amazon Web Services .

#5978

Mariam Sultana

#62523

Overall Influence

Mariam Sultana is a Pakistani astrophysicist. Sultana completed her doctoral studies in astrophysics at the University of Karachi under the supervision of Nuritdinov Salohitdin Nasritdinovich in 2012. She is the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics in Pakistan. Sultana teaches as an assistant professor at the Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology.

#5979

Warren Buck

#60996

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Warren Wesley Buck III is an American physicist. He is credited with establishing the physics PhD program at Hampton University, a historically Black college in Hampton, Virginia, which was also the campus's first PhD program in any subject. Buck was also the first chancellor of University of Washington-Bothell and oversaw the university's transition to a four-year institution. His research focuses on nuclear and subatomic particles, including studies of the interactions between particles and anti-particles and the nature of mesons and the quark model.

#5980

Andrew Fisher

#94213

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Andrew James Fisher is Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London. His team is part of the Condensed Matter and Materials Physics group, and based in the London Centre for Nanotechnology .

#5981

William J. Tremaine

#140513

Overall Influence

#5982

C.-g.chu-guang Zheng

#140514

Overall Influence

#5983

Jack Meadows

#135292

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

Arthur Jack Meadows was a British astronomer and information scientist. Known for founding the astronomy department of University of Leicester. He had a wide-ranging career, including working at the British Museum and as a professor of library and information studies. He published extensively .

#5984

Mike Williams

#98267

Overall Influence

Michael Williams is an experimental particle physicist, faculty member at MIT, and inaugural Deputy Director of the NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions . Biography Williams grew up in suburban Pittsburgh, a city he remained in for his undergraduate and graduate studies. Initially unsure of what he wanted to study or pursue as a career, Williams double-majored in physics and mathematics summa cum laude at Saint Vincent College in 2001 before earning his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Curtis Meyer in 2007. He wo...

#5985

Li

#140619

Overall Influence

#5986

Veniamin Myasnikov

#97387

Overall Influence

1936 - 2004 (68 years)

Veniamin Petrovich Myasnikov was a Soviet mathematician, mechanician and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences . Biography Veniamin Myasnikov was born in Moscow in 1936. He was educated in MSU , which was completed in 1959.

#5987

Mustafa Nazıroğlu

#140690

Overall Influence

#5988

Thomas Jennewein

#79464

Overall Influence

Thomas Jennewein is an Austrian physicist who conducts research in quantum communication and quantum key distribution. He has taught as an associate professor at the University of Waterloo and the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada since 2009. He earned his PhD under Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna in 2002, during which time he performed experiments on Bell's inequality and cryptography with entangled photons. His current work at the Institute for Quantum Computing focuses on satellite-based free space quantum key distribution, with the goal of creating a global qu...

#5989

Yasutake Ohishi

#140704

Overall Influence

#5990

Debra Elmegreen

Debra Elmegreen

#93045

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Debra Meloy Elmegreen is an American astronomer. She was the first woman to graduate from Princeton University with a degree in astrophysics, and she was the first female post-doctoral researcher at the Carnegie Observatories.

#5991

Hrvoje Petek

#112175

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Hrvoje Petek is a Croatian-born American physicist and the Richard King Mellon Professor of Physics and Astronomy, at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also a professor of chemistry. Education Petek received his B.S. degree in chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980. Subsequently, he obtained his Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985.

#5992

Marta Losada

#126322

Overall Influence

Marta Losada Falk is a Colombian high energy physicist, a pioneer of physics in Colombia, and the president of Antonio Nariño University. She should be distinguished from her mother, American-born Colombian mathematician María Falk de Losada, who was rector of Antonio Nariño University from 2001 to 2010.

#5993

Margaret Gardel

#117368

Overall Influence

Margaret Lise Gardel is an American biophysicist. She is the Horace B. Horton Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago. Education After Gardel earned her bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Brown University, she was accepted into physics graduate programs at Harvard University. While completing her PhD, she became interested in the ways actin deforms in response to external mechanical stress. She was encouraged by Clare Waterman and various cell biologists to leave her postdoc position and join a research team at Scripps Research Institute.

#5994

Andreas Eckart

#140851

Overall Influence

#5995

Daniel M. Popper

#130241

Overall Influence

1913 - 1999 (86 years)

Daniel M. Popper was an American astrophysicist. Life and career Popper was born in Oakland, California. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley where he received his Ph.D in 1938. He joined the University of California, Los Angeles in 1947, becoming a full professor in 1955. He worked at UCLA until his retirement in 1978. Popper died in 1999.

#5996

Levente Vitos

#140856

Overall Influence

#5997

Robert Hall Graham

#140866

Overall Influence

#5998

Mukul R. Kundu

#140875

Overall Influence

#5999

Arto V. Nurmikko

#140886

Overall Influence

#6000

Andrew Skumanich

#140914

Overall Influence

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