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,

#901

Geraint F. Lewis

Geraint F. Lewis

#26350

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Geraint Francis Lewis, FLSW is a Welsh astrophysicist, who is best known for his work on dark energy, gravitational lensing and galactic cannibalism. Lewis is a Professor of Astrophysics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, part of the University of Sydney's School of Physics. He is head of the Gravitational Astrophysics Group. He was previously the Associate Head for Research at the School of Physics, and held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship between 2011 and 2015. Lewis won the 2016 Walter Boas Medal in recognition of excellence in research in Physics. In 2021, he was aw...

#902

Franz Wegner

#24803

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Franz Joachim Wegner is emeritus professor for theoretical physics at the University of Heidelberg. Education Franz Wegner attained a doctorate in 1968 with thesis advisor Wilhelm Brenig at the Technical University Munich with the thesis, "Zum Heisenberg-Modell im paramagnetischen Bereich und am kritischen Punkt" .

#903

John G. Taylor

#4472

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

John Gerald Taylor was a British physicist and author. He is notable for writing a book critical of paranormal phenomena. Biography Taylor attended King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford and Mid-Essex Polytechnic, before gaining MA and PhD degrees from Christ's College, Cambridge . He had a wide-ranging academic career in mathematical physics and artificial intelligence. He was an emeritus professor and Director of the centre for Neural Networks at King's College London and guest scientist of the Research Centre at the Institute of Medicine in Jülich, Germany. From 2007 to 2012, Taylor led a unique research program at Commerzbank's Alternative Investment Strategies Group.

#904

Peter E. Hodgson

#17488

Overall Influence

1928 - 2008 (80 years)

Peter E. Hodgson was a British physicist, who also wrote about the philosophy of physics and social issues, and was an active Roman Catholic. Early life Peter E. Hodgson was born on 27 November 1928 in London. He graduated in 1948 with a BSc in physics from Imperial College London. He began experimental research under George Paget Thomson, and was one of the first to identify the K meson and its decay into three pions, giving the most accurate, as of that time, estimate of its mass. In 1951, he was awarded the PhD for this work. In the 1960s, the University of London awarded him the D.Sc.

#905

Denys Wilkinson

Denys Wilkinson

#23354

Overall Influence

1922 - 2016 (94 years)

Sir Denys Haigh Wilkinson FRS was a British nuclear physicist. Life He was born on 5 September 1922 in Leeds, Yorkshire and educated at Loughborough Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1943.

#906

John Huchra

#34336

Overall Influence

1948 - 2010 (62 years)

John Peter Huchra was an American astronomer and professor. He was the Vice Provost for Research Policy at Harvard University and a Professor of Astronomy at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. He was also a former chair of the United States National Committee for the International Astronomical Union. and past president of the American Astronomical Society.

#907

Reinhard Oehme

#32366

Overall Influence

1928 - 2010 (82 years)

Reinhard Oehme was a German-American physicist known for the discovery of C non-conservation in the presence of P violation, the formulation and proof of hadron dispersion relations, the "Edge of the Wedge Theorem" in the function theory of several complex variables, the Goldberger-Miyazawa-Oehme sum rule, reduction of quantum field theories, Oehme-Zimmermann superconvergence relations for gauge field correlation functions, and many other contributions.

#908

Federico Capasso

#12991

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Federico Capasso is an applied physicist and is one of the inventors of the quantum cascade laser during his work at Bell Laboratories. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University. Biography Federico Capasso received the Doctor of Physics degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Rome, Italy, in 1973 and after doing research in fiber optics at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni in Rome, joined Bell Labs in 1976.

#909

David Shugar

#22506

Overall Influence

1915 - 2015 (100 years)

David Shugar was a professor of the University of Warsaw. After the First World War, he settled as a child with his parents in Canada. In 1936 he concluded his education of physics at McGill University in Montreal and obtained his doctorate in 1940. Since January 1941, he did research in biophysics in the laboratory of Research Enterprises, Limited, a Crown Company in Leaside near Toronto, later served in the Canadian Marines with the rank of Electrical Sub-Lieutenant R.C.N.V.R. In 1946 he entered the employ of the Department of National Health and Welfare.

#910

Matias Zaldarriaga

#30440

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Matias Zaldarriaga is a theoretical physicist best known for his work on cosmology. He has made significant contributions toward understanding both astrophysical phenomena and fundamental physics, most notably through his research on modeling the early universe and analyzing statistical properties of cosmic microwave background data. Zaldarriaga grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1994. He received his PhD in 1998 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

#911

Nina Byers

#28398

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Nina Byers was a theoretical physicist, research professor and professor of physics emeritus in the department of physics and astronomy, UCLA, and Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Contributions Byers received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1956.

#912

Thomas Appelquist

Thomas Appelquist

#33238

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Thomas William Appelquist is a theoretical particle physicist who is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University. He received his bachelor's degree from Illinois Benedictine College and his Ph.D. in 1968 from Cornell University under Donald R. Yennie with thesis Parametric Representations of Renormalized Feynman Amplitudes. In 1970, following a postdoctoral appointment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, he joined the faculty at Harvard University. In 1975, he moved to Yale and was appointed professor of physics in 1976. From 1983 until 1989, he served as chair of Yale's department of physics.

#913

Bryan Webber

#27735

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Bryan Ronald Webber, FRS, FInstP is a British physicist and academic. He was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge from 1973 to 2010, and Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge from 1999 to 2010. He has been awarded the Dirac Medal by the Institute of Physics, the Sakurai Prize by the American Physical Society and the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize by the European Physical Society.

#914

Wubbo Ockels

#8594

Overall Influence

1946 - 2014 (68 years)

Wubbo Johannes Ockels was a Dutch physicist and astronaut with the European Space Agency who, in 1985, became the first Dutch citizen in space when he flew on STS-61-A as a payload specialist. He later became professor of aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology.

#915

James Till

#7734

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

James Edgar Till is a University of Toronto biophysicist, best known for demonstrating – with Ernest McCulloch – the existence of stem cells. Early work Till was born in Lloydminster, which is located on the border between Saskatchewan and Alberta. The family farm was located north of Lloydminster, in Alberta; the eastern margin of the farm was the Alberta–Saskatchewan boundary.

#916

Winston H. Bostick

#33619

Overall Influence

1916 - 1991 (75 years)

Winston H. Bostick was an American physicist who discovered plasmoids, plasma focus, and plasma vortex phenomena. He simulated cosmical astrophysics with laboratory plasma experiments, and showed that Hubble expansion can be produced with repulsive mutual induction between neighboring galaxies acting as homopolar generators. His work on plasmas was claimed to be evidence for finite-sized elementary particles and the composition of strings, but this is not accepted by mainstream science.

#917

Shlomo Havlin

#18994

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Shlomo Havlin is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. He served as President of the Israel Physical Society , Dean of Faculty of Exact Sciences , Chairman, Department of Physics .

#918

Bunji Sakita

#18572

Overall Influence

1930 - 2002 (72 years)

was a Japanese-American theoretical physicist who made important contributions in quantum field theory, superstring theory and discovered supersymmetry in 1971. He was a distinguished professor of physics at the City College of New York.

#919

Richard Duffin

#3442

Overall Influence

1909 - 1996 (87 years)

Richard James Duffin was an American physicist, known for his contributions to electrical transmission theory and to the development of geometric programming and other areas within operations research.

#920

Keith Olive

#38000

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Keith Alison Olive is a theoretical physicist, and director at the William I Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota, specializing in particle physics and cosmology. His main topics of research are: big bang nucleosynthesis, which is an explanation of the origin of the light element isotopes through 7Li; particle dark matter; big bang baryogenesis, which is an explanation of the matter-antimatter asymmetry observed in nature; and inflation which is a theory constructed to resolve many outstanding problems in standard cosmology.

#921

Leon Mestel

#22501

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Leon Mestel was an Australian astronomer and astrophysicist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex. His research interests were in the areas of star formation and structure, especially stellar magnetism and astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics. He was awarded both the Eddington Medal and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society . Following his retirement, he wrote several obituaries and biographical articles on physicists and astrophysicists.

#922

Herman Verlinde

#17932

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Herman Louis Verlinde is a Dutch theoretical physicist and string theorist. He is the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics at Princeton University, where he is also the chair of the Department of Physics. He is the identical twin brother of Erik Verlinde.

#923

Bernard Haisch

#23855

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Bernard Haisch is a German-born American astrophysicist who has done research in solar-stellar astrophysics and stochastic electrodynamics. He has developed with Alfonso Rueda a speculative theory that the non-zero lowest energy state of the vacuum, as predicted by quantum mechanics, might provide a physical explanation for the origin of inertia, and might someday be used for spacecraft propulsion. Haisch has advocated the serious scientific study of phenomena outside the traditional scope of science and is known for his interest in the UFO phenomenon as well as a variety of other unorthodox t...

#924

Arthur Gossard

#15986

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

#925

Frank Nabarro

#17939

Overall Influence

1916 - 2006 (90 years)

Frank Reginald Nunes Nabarro MBE OMS FRS was an English-born South African physicist and one of the pioneers of solid-state physics, which underpins much of 21st-century technology. Education Born 7 March 1916 in London, UK, into a Sephardi Jewish family, he studied at Nottingham High School, then at New College, Oxford where he obtained a first-class honours degree in physics in 1937 and another in mathematics in 1938. At the University of Bristol his work under Professor Nevill Francis Mott, a future Nobel Laureate in physics, earned him the Oxford degree of BSc . Then followed an M.A. in 1945.

#926

Albert Allen Bartlett

Albert Allen Bartlett

#8017

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Albert Allen Bartlett was an American professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Professor Bartlett had lectured over 1,742 times since September, 1969 on Arithmetic, Population, and Energy. Bartlett regarded the word combination "sustainable growth" as an oxymoron, and argued that modest annual percentage population increases could lead to exponential growth. He therefore regarded human overpopulation as "The Greatest Challenge" facing humanity.

#927

Anna Frebel

#38293

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Anna Frebel is a German astronomer working on discovering the oldest stars in the universe. Career Anna Frebel grew up in Göttingen, Germany. After finishing high school, she began studying physics in Freiburg im Breisgau but did not finish the physics program and did not obtain a physics degree there. Instead she enrolled in an astronomy program in Australia, where she obtained a PhD in Astronomy from the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra. A W. J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellowship brought her to the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, where she continu...

#928

F. Richard Stephenson

#26927

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

F. Richard Stephenson is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Durham, in the Physics department and the East Asian Studies department. His research concentrates on historical aspects of astronomy, in particular analyzing ancient astronomical records to reconstruct the history of Earth's rotation. He has an asteroid named after him: 10979 Fristephenson.

#929

Louis Essen

#11999

Overall Influence

1908 - 1997 (89 years)

Louis Essen OBE FRS was an English physicist whose most notable achievements were in the precise measurement of time and the determination of the speed of light. He was a critic of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, particularly as it related to time dilation.

#930

Burt Ovrut

#21290

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Burt Ovrut is an American theoretical physicist best known for his work on heterotic string theory. He is currently Professor of Theoretical High Energy Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Ovrut earned his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1978. His doctoral advisors were Benjamin W. Lee and Yoichiro Nambu, and his thesis was on an Sp x U Theory of the Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions.

#931

Yoshinori Tokura

#16472

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

is a Japanese physicist, Professor at University of Tokyo and Director of Center for Emergent Matter Science at RIKEN. He is a specialist in physics of strongly correlated electron systems and known for his work in high-temperature superconductivity, Mott transition, colossal magnetoresistance, Multiferroics, and magnetic skyrmions.

#932

P. Buford Price

#24109

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Paul Buford Price , usually known as P. Buford Price, was a professor in the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His work had been wide-ranging over his career, but began with the study of physics and included cosmic rays, astrophysics, nuclear physics, glaciology, climatology, biology in extreme environments, and origins of life. He was born November 8, 1932, in Memphis, TN and died December 28, 2021.

#933

Somnath Bharadwaj

#30895

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Somnath Bharadwaj is an Indian theoretical physicist who works on Theoretical Astrophysics and Cosmology. Bharadwaj was born in India, studied at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, and later received his PhD from the Indian Institute of Science. After having worked at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, he is now a professor at IIT Kharagpur. He has made significant contributions to the dynamics of large-scale structure formation.

#934

Peter Armbruster

#11773

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Peter Armbruster is a German physicist at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung facility in Darmstadt, Germany, and is credited with co-discovering elements 107 , 108 , 109 , 110 , 111 , and 112 with research partner Gottfried Münzenberg.

#935

James Kakalios

#20229

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

James Kakalios is a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. Known within the scientific community for his work with amorphous semiconductors, granular materials, and 1/f noise, he is known to the general public as the author of the book The Physics of Superheroes, which considers comic book superheroes from the standpoint of fundamental physics.

#936

William L. Burke

#24112

Overall Influence

1941 - 1996 (55 years)

William Lionel Burke was an astronomy, astrophysics, and physics professor at UC Santa Cruz. He is also the author of Spacetime, Geometry, Cosmology , and of Applied differential geometry , a text expounding the virtues of differential forms over vector calculus for theoretical physics. Bill also has a draft of a 3rd book reachable on the web [|Div, Grad, Curl are Dead].

#937

William Nierenberg

William Nierenberg

#11005

Overall Influence

1919 - 2000 (81 years)

William Aaron Nierenberg was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1965 through 1986. He was a co-founder of the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984.

#938

Werner Hofmann

#37860

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Werner Hofmann is a German professor of physics. He is director of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg. Life and work Hofmann studied physics at the University of Karlsruhe, completing his studies with a doctorate in 1977. In 1980 he wrote his Habilitationsschrift at the University of Dortmund. In 1981 he received a Heisenberg Scholarship and from 1984 to 1987 he worked as assistant and associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed full professor of physics in 1987. Since 1988 he is director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg.

#939

Mikhail Strikhanov

Mikhail Strikhanov

#20082

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mikhail Nikolaevich Strikhanov is a Russian physicist. Since 2007 he has been the rector of National Research Nuclear University MEPhI . Early life and career Mikhail Strikhanov was born on July 18, 1952, in Krasnodar, Russia. In 1974 he graduated from MEPhI, where he studied theoretical nuclear physics. From 1974 to 1997 he worked in MEPhI as an assistant researcher, a senior teacher, associate professor and professor. In 1972–1997 Strikhanov served as Institute's prorector.

#940

Edward Guinan

#14685

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Edward F. Guinan is a professor in Villanova University's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He and two colleagues observed evidence of Neptune's ring system in 1968, which was later discovered by Voyager 2 in 1989. He was also involved in building Iran's first high-powered telescope in the 1970s. He has been, and continues to be, involved in various international astronomical collaborations, such as helping to organize teaching and development programs in North Korea.

#941

Roy Schwitters

#16996

Overall Influence

1944 - 2023 (79 years)

Roy F. Schwitters was an American physicist, professor of physics at Harvard, Stanford, and finally the University of Texas at Austin. He was also director of the Superconducting Super Collider between 1989 and 1993.

#942

Anthony Ichiro Sanda

Anthony Ichiro Sanda

#19854

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Anthony Ichiro Sanda is a Japanese-American particle physicist. Along with Ikaros Bigi, he was awarded the 2004 Sakurai Prize for his work on CP violation and B meson decays. Academic life Sanda studied at the University of Illinois and Princeton University . He was a researcher at Columbia University from 1971 to 1974 and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. From 1974 to 1992 he was an Assistant Professor and then associate professor at Rockefeller University. From 1992 he was a professor of physics at Nagoya University. Since 2006 he is a Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University and a professor at Kanagawa University.

#943

Reza Mansouri

#22977

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Reza Mansouri is an Iranian physicist and a retired professor of physics at Sharif University of Technology. Biography Reza Mansouri received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Vienna under the supervision of Roman Ulrich Sexl. He also spent five years as an Assistant Professor there. He served as Deputy Science Minister from 2001 to 2005 and is one of Iran's influential scientific policymakers. Without his efforts, Iran would not have been able to participate in international scientific collaborations such as SESAME and the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva. Mansouri has several publications focusing on scientific development in Iran.

#944

Paul L. Schechter

Paul L. Schechter

#28100

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Paul L. Schechter is an American astronomer and observational cosmologist. He is the William A. M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics, Emeritus, at MIT. Schechter received his bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1968, and his Ph.D. degree from Caltech in 1975. He held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Arizona, then went to Harvard as an assistant professor. He moved to his present position at MIT in 1988. Schechter was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2003.

#945

Ronold W. P. King

#12746

Overall Influence

1905 - 2006 (101 years)

Ronold Wyeth Percival King was an American applied physicist, known for his contributions to the theory and application of microwave antennas. He published twelve books and over three hundred articles in his area, as well as mentored one hundred doctoral dissertations.

#946

Alexei Kitaev

#10730

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Alexei Yurievich Kitaev is a Russian–American professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is best known for introducing the quantum phase estimation algorithm and the concept of the topological quantum computer while working at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is also known for introducing the complexity class QMA and showing the 2-local Hamiltonian problem is QMA-complete, the most complete result for k-local Hamiltonians. Kitaev is also known for contributions to research on a model re...

#947

Per Bak

#5712

Overall Influence

1948 - 2002 (54 years)

Per Bak was a Danish theoretical physicist who coauthored the 1987 academic paper that coined the term "self-organized criticality." Life and work After receiving his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Denmark in 1974, Bak worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He specialized in phase transitions, such as those occurring when an insulator suddenly becomes a conductor or when water freezes. In that context, he also did important work on complicated spatially modulated structures in solids. This research led him to the more general question of how organization emerges from disorder.

#948

Christoph Helmut Keitel

#37863

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Christoph Helmut Keitel is a German physicist, presently a director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg and an honorary professor at Heidelberg University. Keitel studied physics and mathematics at Leibniz University Hannover and physics at the University of Munich, where he graduated in 1990. As a PhD student, he worked with G. Süssmann, mainly supervised by Marlan O. Scully and L. M. Narducci.

#949

Victor Veselago

Victor Veselago

#13868

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Victor Georgievich Veselago was a Soviet/Russian physicist, doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, and a university professor. In 1967, he was the first to publish a theoretical analysis of materials with negative permittivity, ε, and permeability, μ.

#950

Dale R. Corson

#8464

Overall Influence

1914 - 2012 (98 years)

Dale Raymond Corson was an American physicist and academic administrator who was the eighth president of Cornell University. Early life Born in Pittsburg, Kansas, in 1914, Corson received a B.A. degree from the College of Emporia in 1934, his M.A. degree from the University of Kansas in 1935, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1938.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions