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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#8201

Adriana Pesci

#65780

Overall Influence

Adriana Irma Pesci is an Argentine applied mathematician and mathematical physicist at the University of Cambridge, specialising in fluid dynamics. Her research topics have included lattice models of polymer solutions, Hele-Shaw flow, flagellar motion of organisms in fluids, soap films on Möbius strips, and the Leidenfrost effect.

#8202

Stefan Janos

#88623

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Stefan Janos is a Slovak-Swiss university physicist and professor, founder of very low temperature physics in Slovakia. Life Between 1950–1958 he attended the primary school in Suchohrad and Záhorská Ves and between 1958–1961 the high school in Malacky. Thereafter he studied at the Czech Technical University, Faculty of Technical and Nuclear Physics in Prague. In 1966 he graduated from university with diploma thesis “ Specific heat of Fe–Co alloys in the temperature range 1.4 to 4.2 K. He spent his one-year military service mainly at the Research and Test Centre of the Ministry of Defence in Brno.

#8203

Günter Schmahl

#133084

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

Günter Schmahl was a German physicist, professor at the University of Göttingen and a pioneer of X-ray microscopy. The main focus of Schmahl's work, and his most important achievement, was the development of full-field soft X-ray microscopy. He was one of the first to recognize the potential of this method and to identify and follow the technological approach of using zone plates as lenses in such a microscope. Schmahl and his collaborators further developed the technique until it was ready for application in two- and three-dimensional imaging of biological samples.

#8204

Mark Eriksson

#121673

Overall Influence

Mark Alan Eriksson is an American experimental physicist who specializes in experimental studies of nanostructures. He is the John Bardeen Professor of Physics the University of Wisconsin–Madison Education Eriksson earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1992, followed by a Master of Science and PhD in physics from Harvard University.

#8205

Peter Kalmus

#89415

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Peter Kalmus is an American scientist and writer based in Altadena, California. He is a data scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an associate project scientist at UCLA's Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering.

#8206

Jean-Pierre Verdet

#99059

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Jean-Pierre Verdet is a French astronomer, historian of astronomy and mathematician. Biography Jean-Pierre Verdet is a Bachelor of Mathematics. Doctor of Science at Paris Diderot University . In 1963, he entered the Paris Observatory, where, after studying the solar corona, he inaugurated infrared astronomy in France, then studied the radiation of the planets in this wavelength domain. He later became head of the Department of spherical astronomy at Paris Observatory. He has regularly taught the MAS of celestial mechanics at the Observatory, a higher education institution which is authorized ...

#8207

David A. Lind

#102877

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

David Arthur Lind was an American physics professor, Guggenheim Fellow, mountain climber, and skier. He was part of a five-man team that made the first ascent of Forbidden Peak in the North Cascades in 1940.

#8208

Dmitri Maslov

#125926

Overall Influence

Dmitri Maslov is a Canadian-American computer scientist known for his work on quantum circuit synthesis and optimization, quantum advantage, and benchmarking quantum computers. Currently, he is the Chief Software Architect at IBM Quantum. Maslov was formerly a program director for Quantum Information Science at the National Science Foundation. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2021 "for contributions to quantum circuit synthesis and optimization, and compiling for quantum computers."

#8209

Geoff Hall

#148753

Overall Influence

Geoffrey Hall, is a British particle physicist, currently Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for developing radiation and particle detectors and other electronic instruments for use in particle physics experiments, notably the CMS detector in CERN's Large Hadron Collider .

#8210

Jürgen Nührenberg

#147090

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Jürgen Nührenberg is a German plasma physicist. Nührenberg studied physics at the University of Göttingen and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he received his doctorate from in 1969 . He was a post-doctoral student at the University of Iowa and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. In 1971, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching near Munich, where he dealt with the theory of stellarators for controlled nuclear fusion.

#8211

Kevin Anderson

#57008

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Kevin Anderson is a British climate scientist. Anderson has a decade of industrial experience, principally as an engineer in the petrochemical industry. He regularly provides advice on issues of climate change across different tiers of governance, from local and regional through to national and the European Commission.

#8212

Njema Frazier

#169301

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Njema Frazier is a nuclear physicist at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington, D.C. Frazier has a bachelor's degree in physics from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in nuclear physics from Michigan State University.

#8213

Tim Hawarden

#121169

Overall Influence

1943 - 2009 (66 years)

Timothy George Hawarden was a South African astrophysicist known for his pioneering work on passive cooling techniques for space telescopes for which he won NASA's Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal.

#8214

Dominique Bockelée-Morvan

#172308

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Dominique Bockelée-Morvan is a French astrophysicist and planetary scientist specializing in the molecular composition of comets. She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , affiliated with the Paris Observatory, and a former president of Commission 15 on the Physical Study of Comets & Minor Planets of the International Astronomical Union.

#8215

Gladys Vergara

#96425

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

Gladys Elena Vergara Gavagnin was a Uruguayan astronomer and professor, known for her calculations on eclipses, made during a time when computers were not capable of them. The asteroid 5659 Vergara is named in her honor.

#8216

Otto F. Sankey

#149301

Overall Influence

Otto Francis Sankey was an American physicist. He was Regents Professor at Arizona State University and a Fellow of the American Physical Society . Education Sankey received a B.S. in physics from the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and a PhD. in physics from Washington University under the supervision of Peter A. Fedders. After a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Illinois, he spent the rest of his career at ASU.

#8217

Stacy Mader

#89502

Overall Influence

Stacy Lyall Mader is an Australian astronomer. He is a Senior Experimental Scientist at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, and was the first Aboriginal Australian to obtain a PhD in astronomy. Early life, education and research Mader is a Gidja man from Wyndham, in the Kimberly region of Western Australia. He received a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Physics from the University of Western Australia in 1993, and then Masters and PhD degrees from the University of Wollongong. His PhD thesis, entitled "Giant Herbig-Haro Flows: Identification And Consequences", studied outflows in star-forming regions.

#8218

Donald MacRae

#138976

Overall Influence

1916 - 2006 (90 years)

Donald Alexander MacRae was a Canadian astronomer. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia he was the Chair of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Toronto and Director of the David Dunlap Observatory from 1965 to 1978. He was one of a few Canadians who were early Ph.D. graduates in Astronomy from Harvard , where he enrolled after graduating from the University of Toronto in 1937. He appeared in the Academy Award-nominated NFB documentary Universe as the astronomer. He introduced radio astronomy to Toronto, constructing a radio telescope. It was small and so worked at higher frequencies than previous radio telescopes.

#8219

Quentin A. Parker

#172762

Overall Influence

#8220

Louise Gray Young

#132911

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Louise Gray Young was an American astronomer and researcher who specialised in molecular spectroscopy. She is best known for her spectroscopic analysis of the planetary atmospheres of Earth, Venus and Mars.

#8221

Jordi Sort Viñas

#170422

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Jordi Sort Viñas is a Catalan physicist working as an 'ICREA Research Professor' at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain leading the “Group of Smart Nanoengineered Materials, Nanomechanics and Nanomagnetism ” in the development of functional materials for diverse applications. Sort received his PhD degree in Materials Science from UAB in 2002 later publishing more than 270 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals that have received approximately 6600 citations.

#8222

Wiebke Drenckhan

Wiebke Drenckhan

#126469

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Wiebke Drenckhan, born 6 April 1977 in Bad Belzig, is a German physicist. She is a CNRS research director at the Institut Charles Sadron, where she investigates the physics and physical chemistry of liquid and solid foams and emulsions. She also works as illustrator for scientific journals and popular science books and she collaborates regularly with artists and designers.

#8223

Geoff Stedman

#154622

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Geoffrey Ernest Stedman is a New Zealand physicist, with research interests including the foundations of relativity, symmetry in quantum mechanics, and ring lasers. Education and career Born in 1943, Stedman attended the University of Canterbury, graduating with a BSc in physics in 1965. He subsequently went to Queen Mary College, University of London, where he completed his PhD under Douglas Newman in 1968. After post-doctoral research, also at Queen Mary, Stedman returned to lecture at Canterbury in 1971. He retired in 2003 and was granted the title of emeritus professor.

#8224

Andrey Gaponov-Grekhov

#139207

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Andrei Viktorovich Gaponov-Grekhov was a Russian physicist, a Full Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences , the founder of the Institute of Applied Physics in Nizhny Novgorod, and its first director in 1976-2003.

#8225

Park Yung-woo

#148854

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Park Yung-woo is a South Korean physicist, who has worked in the field of materials science. Education Park graduated summa cum laude in 1975 from the Physics Department of Seoul National University in South Korea. He received his Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States in 1980. Park's Ph.D. thesis on the "Electrical Transport Studies of Pure and Doped Polyacetylene" was supervised by Professor Alan J. Heeger.

#8226

Amy Barr

#156119

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Amy Barr Mlinar is an American planetary geophysicist known for her studies of icy body formation. She is a member of the National Academies Standing Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science and a co-investigator on NASA's Europa Imaging System and REASON instruments.

#8227

Carolyn Larabell

#149382

Overall Influence

Carolyn Larabell is an American scientist that led the first construction and commissioning of a soft x-ray microscope to be used for biological imaging Her research primarily focuses on X-ray microtomography, a technology that allows for a 3D visualization of different cells. Larabell is a joint anatomy professor at the University of California, San Francisco and both the founder and director of the National Center for X-ray Tomography.

#8228

Nigel Badnell

#172913

Overall Influence

Nigel Robert Badnell is a British physicist, currently at University of Strathclyde and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.

#8229

Igor Meglinski

#97331

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Igor Meglinski is a scientist studying the imaging of cells and biological tissues utilising polarised light, dynamic light scattering and computational imitation of light propagation within complex tissue-like scattering medium. He is the Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Biophotonics at Aston University and holds the Professor of Opto-Electronics and Biophotonics at Oulu University.

#8230

Dieter Langbein

#101221

Overall Influence

1932 - 2004 (72 years)

Dieter Langbein, Dr. phil. nat., was a German physicist, whose fields of research included solid state physics, fluid physics and microgravity. He was born on 10 February 1932 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany as Werner Dietrich Langbein and died on 25 June 2004 in Bad Homburg, Germany. He was married and had a son and two daughters.

#8231

Hudong Chen

#150871

Overall Influence

Hudong Chen is a physicist. Chen was affiliated with the Bartol Research Institute, and later worked for Exa Corporation. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1999, "[f]or contributions to fundamental fluid and magnetohydrodynamic turbulence theory, pioneering work in discrete many-body systems and Lattice Boltzmann representations, and industrial applications and practical numerical methods based upon these ideas."

#8232

Mei-Ching Fok

#87059

Overall Influence

Mei-Ching Hannah Fok is a planetary scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. She was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 2011 and elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2019. She has worked on the IMAGE, Van Allen Probes and TWINS missions.

#8233

Igal Brener

#113626

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Igal Brener is an physicist at Sandia National Laboratories who was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for his contributions to terahertz science and technology. Brener is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America. He maintains active research programs in nanophotonics, metamaterials and Terahertz S&T.

#8234

Anne Tropper

#169321

Overall Influence

Anne C. Tropper is a Professor of Physics at the University of Southampton. Her work considers solid-state and semiconductor lasers; specifically the development of ytterbium-doped silica fibre lasers and Vertical External-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers. She was elected a Fellow of The Optical Society in 2006, and awarded the 2021 SPIE Maiman Laser Award for her contributions to laser source science and technology.

#8235

Stephanie Wilson

Stephanie Wilson

#8206

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Stephanie Diana Wilson is an American engineer and a NASA astronaut. She flew to space onboard three Space Shuttle missions, and is the second African American woman to go into space, after Mae Jemison. her 42 days in space are the second most of any female African American astronaut, having been surpassed by Jessica Watkins in 2022.

#8236

Anna Consortini

#135726

Overall Influence

Anna Consortini is an Italian physicist in and a retired Professor of Physics at the University of Florence. She was a founder of the Italian Society for Optics and Photonics, and President of the International Commission for Optics from 1993 to 1996.

#8237

Paul G. Comba

#75896

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Paul G. Comba was an Italian-American computer scientist, an amateur astronomer and a prolific discoverer of minor planets. He was born in Tunisia to Italian parents in 1926, and moved to Italy at a young age. Admitted to university studies at the age of 17, He attended the University of Turin . In 1946 he moved to the United States to attend Bluffton College, from which he graduated in 1947. He then attended Caltech, and completed his Ph.D. work in mathematics in 1951 . In 1951 he moved to Honolulu where he taught at the University of Hawaii until 1960.

#8238

Alan Duffy

#151040

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Alan R. Duffy is a British and Australian professional astronomer and science communicator. He was born in England, raised in Northern Ireland, and is currently based in Australia. He is a professor at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology, and is the Lead Scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia.

#8239

Shun Lien Chuang

#104056

Overall Influence

1954 - 2014 (60 years)

Shun Lien Chuang was a Taiwanese-American electrical engineer, optical engineer, and physicist. He was a Fellow of the IEEE, OSA, APS and JSPS, and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

#8240

Kristen Sellgren

#172747

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Kristen Sellgren is an American retired astronomer and Professor Emerita at the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, Ohio State University. She won the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 1990. She is the founder of American Astronomical Society's Committee for Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities in Astronomy .

#8241

Helmuth Möhwald

#89492

Overall Influence

1946 - 2018 (72 years)

Helmuth Möhwald was a German physicist and founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam. His research focus on molecular interfaces, ultrathin films, coated colloids and capsules, membranes, and nanostructured and functional interfaces.

#8242

Monika Schleier-Smith

#71668

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Monika Schleier-Smith is an American experimental physicist studying many-body quantum physics by precisely assembling systems of ultracold atoms. These atomic, molecular, and optical physics engineered systems have applications in quantum sensing, coherent control, and quantum computing. Schleier-Smith is an associate professor of physics at Stanford University, a Sloan Research Fellow, and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient. Schleier-Smith also serves on the board of directors for the Hertz Foundation.

#8243

Koichiro Matsuno

#142850

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

#8244

Herman Brenner White

Herman Brenner White

#135822

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Herman Brenner White is an American physicist who works at Fermilab. He won the 2010 American Physical Society Edward A Bouchet Award. Early life and education White was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. His mother, Susie Mae Fort White, worked at John Andrew Hospital and his father, Herman Brenner White Senior, served in the military. He studied at the Tuskegee Institute High School, where he became interested in nuclear engineering. He was raised in a segregated community. He saw his role in the civil rights movement as being an exceptional student who could prove that black people deserved equal access to education.

#8245

Joseph E. Pesce

#156528

Overall Influence

Joseph E. Pesce is an Italian-American astrophysicist and Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in the US. He is a part-time professor at George Mason University and a visiting professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

#8246

Nguyễn Xuân Vinh

#10852

Overall Influence

1930 - 2022 (92 years)

Nguyễn Xuân Vinh was a Vietnamese-American aerospace scientist and educator. Vinh was Professor Emeritus of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he taught for nearly thirty years. His seminal work on the guidance, dynamics and optimal control of space vehicles and their interaction with the atmosphere played a fundamental role in space exploration and technological development.

#8247

Michael Tendler

#134075

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Michael Tendler is a Swedish Physicist, currently Professor of Fusion Plasma Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm . He is the Invited Professor at the Plasma Physics Laboratory Princeton University, USA and the Chubu University, Japan.

#8248

Idit Zehavi

#157120

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Idit Zehavi is an Israeli astrophysicist and researcher who discovered an anomaly in the mapping of the cosmos, which offered insight into how the universe is expanding. She is part of the team completing the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and is one of the world's most highly cited scientists according to the list published annually by Thomson Reuters.

#8249

David Beaglehole

#132126

Overall Influence

1938 - 2014 (76 years)

David Beaglehole was a New Zealand physicist. Early life, family and education Beaglehole was born in Wellington in 1938 into an academic family. His parents were American-born linguist Pearl Beaglehole and her husband Ernest Beaglehole, a psychologist and ethnologist, who had met while they were both studying at the London School of Economics. His uncle was historian John Beaglehole.

#8250

Marcel Guénin

#152749

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Marcel André Guénin is a theoretical physicist and mathematician, and Professor Emeritus of the University of Geneva. He obtained his PhD in 1962 at the University of Geneva under the supervision of Ernst Stueckelberg with a thesis titled "Opérateurs de champ antilinéaires, T- et CP-covariance".

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions