The Most Influential People Across History
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,
#651
R. Michael Rich
#19046
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Robert Michael Rich is an American astrophysicist. He obtained his B.A. at Pomona College in 1979 and earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1986 under thesis supervisor Jeremy R. Mould. He was a Carnegie Fellow at Carnegie/DTM until 1988 when he joined the faculty of Columbia University where he was the doctoral thesis adviser to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and is on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Gregory Gabadadze
#18106
Overall Influence
Gregory Gabadadze is a physicist of Georgian origin. He is a professor of physics and dean for science at New York University, where he served previously as chair of the Department of Physics and as the director of the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics.
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Daniel Kleppner
#15676
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Daniel Kleppner, born 1932, is the Lester Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms. His areas of science include atomic, molecular, and optical physics, and his research interests include experimental atomic physics, laser spectroscopy, and high precision measurements.
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Marvin L. Cohen
#16178
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Marvin Lou Cohen is an American–Canadian theoretical physicist. He is a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Cohen is a leading expert in the field of condensed matter physics. He is widely known for his seminal work on the electronic structure of solids.
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Donald Hill Perkins
#27197
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
Donald Hill Perkins was a British physicist and an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford. He achieved great success in the field of particle physics and was also known for his books. Perkins was born in 1925 and educated at Imperial College London. In 1945 he received his B.Sc. and 1948, a Ph.D. From 1949 he worked at Bristol University and in 1955/56 at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. In 1956 he received the post of reader in Bristol University. In 1963/64 he conducted research at CERN. In 1965 he became Oxford professor of elementary particle physics. There, under the leadership of Denys Wilkinson, he built, along with Ken W.
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Richard Jozsa
#6039
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Richard Jozsa is an Australian mathematician who holds the Leigh Trapnell Chair in Quantum Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where his research investigates quantum information science. A pioneer of his field, he is the co-author of the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm and one of the co-inventors of quantum teleportation.
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Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger
#15159
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger was an American physicist well known for his contributions to the theory of interacting electrons in one-dimensional metals and the Fermi-liquid theory. He received his BS and PhD in physics from MIT in 1947. His brother was the physical chemist Lionel Luttinger and his nephew is the mathematician Karl Murad Luttinger .
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Peter Jenni
#22082
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Peter Jenni, is an experimental particle physicist working at CERN. He is best known as one of the "founding fathers" of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider together with a few other colleagues. He acted as spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration until 2009. ATLAS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1992 involving roughly 3,000 physicists at 183 institutions in 38 countries. Jenni was directly involved in the experimental work leading to the discoveries of the W and Z bosons in the 1980s and the Higgs boson in 2012. He is author of about 1000 publications in sc...
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Xenia de la Ossa
#10963
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Xenia de la Ossa Osegueda is a theoretical physicist whose research focuses on mathematical structures that arise in string theory. She is a professor at Oxford's Mathematical Institute. Academic career Xenia de la Ossa received her PhD from University of Texas at Austin with the dissertation Quantum Calabi-Yau Manifolds and Mirror Symmetry written under the supervision of Willy Fischler.
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Riccardo Barbieri
#23613
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Riccardo Barbieri is an Italian theoretical physicist and a professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He has written more than two hundred research papers in the field of theoretical elementary particle physics, and has been particularly influential in physics beyond the Standard Model.
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Reginald Victor Jones
#3980
Overall Influence
1911 - 1997 (86 years)
Reginald Victor Jones , FRSE, LLD was a British physicist and scientific military intelligence expert who played an important role in the defence of Britain in by solving scientific and technical problems, and by the extensive use of deception throughout the war to confuse the Germans.
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Jeffrey Bub
#7365
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jeffrey Bub is a physicist and philosopher of physics, and Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy, the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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Gian Francesco Giudice
#24170
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Gian Francesco Giudice is an Italian theoretical physicist working at CERN in particle physics and cosmology. Academic career After graduating in physics from the University of Padua in 1984, Giudice obtained in 1988 his PhD in theoretical physics from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste. Between 1988 and 1990 he was Research Associate at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. Between 1990 and 1992 he was Research Fellow in the Physics Department of the University of Texas at Austin, in the group led by Steven Weinberg. After being employed by the Istitut...
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László Tisza
#9088
Overall Influence
1907 - 2009 (102 years)
László Tisza was a Hungarian-born American physicist who was Professor of Physics Emeritus at MIT. He was a colleague of famed physicists Edward Teller, Lev Landau and Fritz London, and initiated the two-fluid theory of liquid helium.
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Uroš Seljak
#22621
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Uroš Seljak is a Slovenian cosmologist and a professor of astronomy and physics at University of California, Berkeley. He is particularly well-known for his research in cosmology and approximate Bayesian statistical methods.
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Karen Barad
#3285
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Karen Michelle Barad is an American feminist theorist and physicist, known particularly for their theory of agential realism. Biography They are currently Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They are the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Their research topics include feminist theory, physics, twentieth-century continental philosophy, epistemology, ontology, philosophy of physics, cultural studies of science, and feminist science studies.
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Philip Abelson
#5506
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Philip Hauge Abelson was an American physicist, scientific editor and science writer. Trained as a nuclear physicist, he co-discovered the element neptunium, worked on isotope separation in the Manhattan Project, and wrote the first study of nuclear marine propulsion for submarines. He later worked on a broad range of scientific topics and related public policy, including organic geochemistry, paleobiology and energy policy.
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Eli Yablonovitch
#5461
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Eli Yablonovitch is an American physicist and engineer who, along with Sajeev John, founded the field of photonic crystals in 1987. He and his team were the first to create a 3-dimensional structure that exhibited a full photonic bandgap, which has been named Yablonovite. In addition to pioneering photonic crystals, he was the first to recognize that a strained quantum-well laser has a significantly reduced threshold current compared to its unstrained counterpart. This is now employed in the majority of semiconductor lasers fabricated throughout the world. His seminal paper reporting inhibite...
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Sam Edwards
#13240
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Sir Samuel Frederick Edwards was a Welsh physicist. The Sam Edwards Medal and Prize is named in his honour. Early life and studies Edwards was born on 1 February 1928 in Swansea, Wales, the son of Richard and Mary Jane Edwards. He was educated at the Bishop Gore School, Swansea, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, the University of Manchester, and at Harvard University, in the United States. He wrote his thesis under Julian Schwinger on the structure of the electron, and subsequently developed the functional integral form of field theory.
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Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.
#14780
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. is an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize laureate in Physics for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."
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Alfred Mueller
#24752
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Alfred H. Mueller is an American theoretical physicist, and the Enrico Fermi Professor of Physics at Columbia University. Mueller studied at Iowa State University, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1961 and in 1965 completed his PhD at MIT. He then served until 1971 as a post-doc at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Since 1972 he has been at Columbia University. He was also a visiting scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study , at the nuclear research centers in Saclay, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, New York University, and at SL...
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Scott S. Sheppard
#8277
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Scott Sander Sheppard is an American astronomer and a discoverer of numerous moons, comets and minor planets in the outer Solar System. He is an astronomer in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC. He attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate, and received his bachelor in physics with honors in 1998. Starting as a graduate student at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, he was credited with the discovery of many small moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. He has also discovered the first know...
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Johann Rafelski
#15535
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Johann Rafelski is a German-American theoretical physicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, guest scientist at CERN , and has been LMU-Excellent Guest Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.
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Laurent Freidel
#8483
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Laurent Freidel is a French theoretical physicist and mathematical physicist known mainly for his contributions to quantum gravity, including loop quantum gravity, spin foam models, doubly special relativity, group field theory, relative locality and most recently metastring theory. He is currently a faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
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Edwin Thompson Jaynes
#5017
Overall Influence
1922 - 1998 (76 years)
Edwin Thompson Jaynes was the Wayman Crow Distinguished Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He wrote extensively on statistical mechanics and on foundations of probability and statistical inference, initiating in 1957 the maximum entropy interpretation of thermodynamics as being a particular application of more general Bayesian/information theory techniques . Jaynes strongly promoted the interpretation of probability theory as an extension of logic.
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Willard Boyle
#4965
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Willard Sterling Boyle, was a Canadian physicist. He was a pioneer in the field of laser technology and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. As director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm he helped select lunar landing sites and provided support for the Apollo space program.
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Ferenc Krausz
#4747
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Ferenc Krausz is a Hungarian physicist working in attosecond science. He is a director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and a professor of experimental physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. His research team has generated and measured the first attosecond light pulse and used it for capturing electrons' motion inside atoms, marking the birth of attophysics. In 2023, jointly with Pierre Agostini and Anne L'Huillier, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Richard Ellis
#19231
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard Salisbury Ellis is Professor of Astrophysics at the University College London. He previously served as the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology . He was awarded the 2011 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 2022 the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and in 2023 the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.
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Constantino Tsallis
#9221
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Constantino Tsallis is a naturalized Brazilian physicist of Greek descent, working in Rio de Janeiro at Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas , Brazil. Biography Tsallis was born in Greece, and grew up in Argentina, where he studied physics at Instituto Balseiro, in Bariloche. In 1974, he received a Doctorat d'État ès Sciences Physiques degree from the University of Paris-Sud. He moved to Brazil in 1975 with his wife and daughter.
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Shamit Kachru
#15375
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Shamit Kachru is an American theoretical physicist, a professor emeritus of physics at Stanford University, and a former Wells Family Director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. He served as the Stanford Physics Department Chair from 2018 to 2021. He retired in 2023.
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Rabindra Mohapatra
#21683
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Rabindra Nath Mohapatra is an Indian American theoretical physicist, known for his work on the seesaw mechanism in neutrino physics. Mohapatra was born in the small village Musagadia in Mayurbhanj State. He studied at Utkal University in Bhubaneswar and the University of Delhi . In 1969 he earned his PhD under Robert Marshak at the University of Rochester. Subsequently he was a post-doc at Stony Brook University and at the University of Maryland. In 1974 he became an assistant professor and in 1976 associate professor at City College of CUNY under Bunji Sakita. In the academic year 1980/1 he was a visiting professor at Max Planck Institute for Physics.
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Mark Newman
#8542
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mark Newman is an English–American physicist and Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan, as well as an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. He is known for his fundamental contributions to the fields of complex networks and complex systems, for which he was awarded the 2014 Lagrange Prize.
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James Charles Phillips
#17938
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
James Charles Phillips is an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences . Phillips invented the exact theory of the ionicity of chemical bonding in semiconductors, as well as new theories of compacted networks .
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Feza Gürsey
#6229
Overall Influence
1921 - 1992 (71 years)
Feza Gürsey was a Turkish mathematician and physicist. Among his contributions to theoretical physics, his work on the chiral model and on SU symmetry of the quark model are the most well-known. Early life Feza Gürsey was born on April 7, 1921, in Istanbul, to Reşit Süreyya Gürsey, a military physician, and Remziye Hisar, a chemist and a pioneering Turkish scientist. He graduated from Galatasaray High School in 1940, and received his degree in Mathematics – Physics from Istanbul University in 1944.
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Paolo Budinich
#9725
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Paolo Budinich was an Italian theoretical physicist. Born in Lussingrande to a family of sailors, he grew up and studied in Trieste, where the family resided and his father Antonio Budini taught in the local high school, which Paolo attended until 1934. He later began his studies at Università Degli Studi di Pisa graduating from the Scuola Normale Superiore in 1938, with a thesis written under the direction of Leonida Tonelli.
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David Todd Wilkinson
#22254
Overall Influence
1935 - 2002 (67 years)
David Todd Wilkinson was an American cosmologist, specializing in the study of the cosmic microwave background radiation . Education Wilkinson was born in Hillsdale, Michigan on May 13, 1935, and earned his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Michigan under the supervision of H. Richard Crane.
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Raymond Stora
#13125
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Raymond Félix Stora was a French theoretical physicist. He was a researcher at Service de Physique Théorique at CEA Saclay, then a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research at CPT Marseille and at LAPP Annecy, as well as a member of CERN's theory group. His work focused on particle physics.
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Ethan Siegel
#18110
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Ethan R. Siegel is an American theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, who studies the Big Bang theory. In the past he has been a professor at Lewis & Clark College and a blogger at Starts With a Bang, on ScienceBlogs and also on Forbes.com since 2016.
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Chris Quigg
#22203
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Chris Quigg is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory . He graduated from Yale University in 1966 and received his Ph.D. in 1970 under the tutelage of J. D. Jackson at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been an associate professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, State University of New York, Stony Brook, and was head of the Theoretical Physics Department at Fermilab from 1977 to 1987.
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Merieme Chadid
#9493
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Merieme Chadid is a Moroccan-French astronomer, explorer and astrophysicist. She leads international polar scientific programs and has been committed to installing a major astronomical observatory at the heart of Antarctica.
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Curt Michel
#21611
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Frank Curtis "Curt" Michel was an American astrophysicist; a professor of astrophysics at Rice University in Houston, Texas; a United States Air Force pilot; and a NASA astronaut. Personal life Michel was born June 5, 1934, to parents to Frank and Viola Michel. He was married to Bonnie Hausman, a web technical specialist. He had two children, Alice and Jeff with his first wife Beverly, who preceded him in death, and three grandchildren. His hobbies were photography, tennis, handball, and baseball. Michel died at the age of 80 on February 26, 2015. He was buried with full military honors at t...
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Luboš Motl
#11945
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Luboš Motl is a Czech physicist and blogger. He was an assistant professor in physics at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007. His scientific publications were focused on string theory. He is currently a visiting scholar at Rutgers in high energy physics.
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Sandip Trivedi
#18388
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Sandip Trivedi is an Indian theoretical physicist working at Tata Institute for Fundamental Research at Mumbai, India, while he is its current director. He is well known for his contributions to string theory, in particular finding the first models of accelerated expansion of the universe in low energy supersymmetric string . His research areas include string theory, cosmology and particle physics. He is now member of program advisory board of International Center for Theoretical Sciences . He is also the recipient of the Infosys Prize 2010 in the category of Physical Sciences.
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Bernhard Schölkopf
#5724
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Bernhard Schölkopf is a German computer scientist known for his work in machine learning, especially on kernel methods and causality. He is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, where he heads the Department of Empirical Inference. He is also an affiliated professor at ETH Zürich, honorary professor at the University of Tübingen and the Technical University Berlin, and chairman of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems .
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Cecilia Jarlskog
#23763
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Cecilia Jarlskog is a Swedish theoretical physicist, working mainly on elementary particle physics. Jarlskog obtained her doctorate in 1970 in theoretical particle physics at the Technical University of Lund. She is known for her work on CP violation in the electroweak sector of the Standard Model, introducing what is known as the Jarlskog invariant, and for her work on grand unified theories .
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Stanislav Mikheyev
#22330
Overall Influence
1940 - 2011 (71 years)
Stanislav Pavlovich Mikheyev was a Russian physicist known for the discovery of the MSW effect. Education and research Stanislav Mikheyev graduated from Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University in 1965. Then he became a researcher at Lebedev Physical Institute. Since 1970 he was a researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences , where he earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1983.
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Shahn Majid
#9383
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Shahn Majid is an English pure mathematician and theoretical physicist, trained at Cambridge University and Harvard University and, since 2001, a professor of mathematics at the School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London.
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Kathryn C. Thornton
#10549
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Kathryn Ryan Cordell Thornton is an American scientist and a former NASA astronaut with over 975 hours in space, including 21 hours of extravehicular activity. She was the associate dean for graduate programs at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, currently a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
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Gary Horowitz
#13267
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Gary T. Horowitz is an American theoretical physicist who works on string theory and quantum gravity. Biography Horowitz studied at Princeton University and obtained his Ph.D. in 1979 at the University of Chicago with Robert Geroch. Subsequently, he was a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Oxford University . In 1981-1983 he worked as an Einstein Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He became an assistant professor in 1983, associate professor in 1986, and finally professor in 1990 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
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Jennifer Wiseman
#16610
Overall Influence
Jennifer J. Wiseman is Senior Project Scientist on the Hubble Space Telescope, and an American astronomer, born in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics from MIT and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University in 1995. Wiseman discovered periodic comet 114P/Wiseman-Skiff while working as an undergraduate search assistant in 1987. Wiseman is a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where she serves as the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope. She previously headed the Laboratory for Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics. ...
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