Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#9151

William Brown

#137270

Overall Influence

1945 - 2019 (74 years)

William Arthur Brown, CBE , also known as Willie Brown, was an academic specialising in the field of industrial relations, who served as Master of Darwin College, Cambridge. Education and academic career Brown was born in Leeds, where his father Arthur Joseph Brown, CBE, FBA was Professor of Economics and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leeds .

#9152

David Norman

#169822

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Professor David Norman is a British Chartered Physicist and ornithologist, he has lived in Cheshire since 1978. Physics Professor Norman is a former director of synchrotron radiation, Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, Daresbury Laboratory. He was a visiting professor in surface science at the University of Liverpool.

#9153

Bengt Aurivillius

#142311

Overall Influence

1918 - 1994 (76 years)

Bengt Aurivillius was a Swedish chemist known for his research in metal and mixed oxides. Education and career Aurivillius received his basic scientific education at the then Stockholm University where he graduated in 1937 and earned a fil. lic. in 1943. By 1949, he had made some important discoveries about the oxidation of mixed metals, which became quite prominent in the world of chemistry. He completed his dissertation, "X-ray Examinations of Bismuth Oxifluoride and Mixed Oxides with Trivalent Bismuth", at Stockholm University in 1951. Aurivillius joined the Swedish National Defence Research Institute in 1952, where he worked first as a research engineer and later senior researcher.

#9154

Mary Ann Sweeney

#147692

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Mary Ann Sweeney is an American physicist at Sandia National Laboratories. Although her doctoral research concerned astronomy, her work at Sandia has largely concerned inertial confinement fusion and pulsed power.

#9155

Libby Heaney

#171599

Overall Influence

Libby Heaney is a British artist and quantum physicist known for her pioneering work on AI and quantum computing. She works on the impact of future technologies and is widely known to be the first artist to use quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium. Her work has been featured internationally, including in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern and the Science Gallery.

#9156

Stephanie Zimmermann

#177852

Overall Influence

1973 - 2020 (47 years)

Stephanie Zimmermann was a German physicist who worked on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As a researcher from the University of Freiburg, she was involved in the Muon Detector Control System activities, and she served as muon run-coordinator. She was elected and served as ATLAS Run-Coordinator in 2012–2014. She then became Project Leader of the New Small Wheel project , part of an extensive upgrade, the largest phase 1 upgrade project for the ATLAS detector.

#9157

Valeska Zambra

#184067

Overall Influence

1994 - Present (32 years)

Valeska Zambra is a Chilean physicist specialised in the area of state of matter and strange matter. Early life and scientific career Valeska Zambra has been interested in science since her first years of life. When she was only 12 years old she joined the Sciences Association of her school San Agustín in Copiapó .

#9158

Michael Dennis Feit

#178170

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Michael Dennis Feit was an American physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California. Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, he studied physics at Lehigh University, graduating B.A in physics in 1964, which was followed by a Ph.D. in 1969 from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After a brief period as a research associate in the department of physics at the University of Illinois he joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1972.

#9159

ScienceDirect

#186516

Overall Influence

#9160

David R. Nelson

#186546

Overall Influence

#9161

Brigitta Sipőcz

#162490

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Brigitta Sipőcz is a Hungarian astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. Sipőcz works as a researcher at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. At the time she was searching for the transit of M dwarfs.

#9162

Francesca Calegari

#185822

Overall Influence

Francesca Calegari is an Italian physicist who is lead of the Attosecond Science division at the Center for Free Electron Laser Science at DESY. She is a professor at the University of Hamburg. Calegari is interested in the electron dynamics of complex systems. She was awarded the International Commission of Optics Prize and the Ernst Abbe Medal.

#9163

William Lederman

#56860

Overall Influence

1916 - 1992 (76 years)

William Ralph Lederman, was a Canadian constitutional scholar and the first dean of Queen's University Faculty of Law. Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, he received a LL.B. from the University of Saskatchewan in 1940. He served in the Royal Canadian Artillery from 1941 to 1945, serving with a light anti-aircraft regiment in the United Kingdom and Northwest Europe. He was a Rhodes Scholar and a Vinerian Scholar where he received a B.C.L. From 1949 to 1958 he taught at Dalhousie University. In 1958, he became the first Dean of the Queen's University Faculty of Law. He was in this post until 1968 and continued to teach in the faculty until the 1980s.

#9164

Vladimir Buslaev

#176293

Overall Influence

1937 - 2012 (75 years)

Vladimir Savel'evich Buslaev was a Russian mathematical physicist. Education Buslajew received his Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of Leningrad under Olga Ladyzhenskaya with thesis Short-Wave Asymptotics of Diffraction Problems in Convex Domains. He was a professor at Saint Petersburg State University.

#9165

Harry Wilks Fulbright

#186589

Overall Influence

1918 - 2009 (91 years)

Harry Wilks Fulbright Jr. was an American physics professor, experimental nuclear physicist, and designer and builder of equipment for radio astronomy. He graduated in 1940 with an A.B. and in 1944 with a Ph.D. in physics from Washington University in St. Louis. At Washington University in St. Louis he was in charge of the cyclotron and was under contract to the Manhattan Project from 1942 to 1944. From 1944 to 1946 he worked at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. In 1947 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. From 1946 to 1950 he was a faculty member in the physics department of Princeton University.

#9166

Brian Vohnsen

#183010

Overall Influence

Brian Vohnsen is an Associate Professor of Physics at UCD in Dublin, Ireland specializing in optics. He is head of the Advanced Optical Imaging Group which he founded in 2008. He has received recognition for his ability to connect the field of biomedical optics and nano-optics. In 2021 he became a fellow of Optica for significant contributions to vision science, including photoreceptor optics and high resolution retinal imaging.

#9167

Kevin Kendall

#133454

Overall Influence

Kevin Kendall FRS is a British physicist who received a London external BSc degree at Salford CAT in 1965 while working as an engineering apprentice at Joseph Lucas Gas Turbine Ltd. He became interested in surface science during his Ph.D. study in the Cavendish Laboratory and devised a novel method for measuring the true contact area between solids using an ultrasonic transmission. That led to new arguments about the adhesion of contacting solids, giving a theory of adhesion and fracture that applies to a wide range of problems of high industrial significance, especially in the chemical industry where fine particles stick together tenaciously.

#9168

Adam Leibovich

#172176

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Adam Leibovich is an American theoretical physicist. He is a full professor and the Betty J. and Ralph E. Bailey Dean of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the College of General Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His research is primarily in quantum chromodynamics and the application of effective field theory to problems of hadronic physics, particularly particles containing one or more heavy quarks. Leibovich also has worked on gravitational wave physics. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2017 and a fellow of the American Association for...

#9169

Kristian Fossheim

Kristian Fossheim

#157400

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Kristian Johan Fossheim is a Norwegian physicist. He was born in Jølster. He took the dr.philos. degree in 1972, was an associate professor at the Norwegian Institute of Technology from 1970 to 1980, and professor from 1980. He has been vice-praeses of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences.

#9170

David Drabold

#173570

Overall Influence

David Alan Drabold is an American physicist, currently Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University. Early life Born in Akron, Ohio, he received a B.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Akron in 1982, and a PhD. in physics from Washington University in St. Louis under the supervision of Peter Fedders. He held term appointments in the department of physics at the University of Notre Dame, and Materials Science and Engineering and Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where his key mentors were Otto F. Sankey and Richard M. Martin.

#9171

George Burba

#93307

Overall Influence

George Burba is an American bio-atmospheric scientist, author, and inventor. Burba is a Science & Strategy Fellow at LI-COR Biosciences of the Battery Ventures Group, a Global Fellow at Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute, and a Graduate Adjunct Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is a co-founder of CarbonDew, a non-profit Community of Practice developing novel climate solutions across economic sectors.

#9172

Peter Dornan

#177260

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Peter John Dornan FRS is a British physicist, and professor at Imperial College London where he advised his PhD student Ann Heinson. On 18 September 2009, a festschrift was held in his honor. Dornan was awarded the Rutherford Medal and Prize in 2002.

#9173

Harold Marshall

#48539

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Sir Arthur Harold Marshall is a New Zealand expert in acoustics design and research. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Auckland School of Architecture, and co-founder of Marshall Day Acoustics Ltd in 1981 with Chris Day. He currently resides in Auckland New Zealand, and continues work with Marshall Day Acoustics as a group consultant.

#9174

Steve Webb

#133931

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Steve Webb is a British medical physicist and writer. He is an emeritus professor of physics at the Joint Department of Physics in the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital. He was editor-in-chief of Physics in Medicine and Biology for six years, being succeeded in 2011 by Simon Cherry.

#9175

Mariolina Padula

#77477

Overall Influence

Mariarosaria Padula was an Italian mathematical physicist specializing in fluid dynamics, including free boundary problems and compressible flow with viscosity. She was a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Ferrara, and is also known for revitalizing and heading the university's mathematical journal, Annali dell’Università di Ferrara, and forging it into an internationally known journal.

#9176

Michael Pitman

#81295

Overall Influence

1933 - 2000 (67 years)

Michael George Pitman OBE was an English-born Australian biologist, who was Chief Scientist of Australia from 1992 to 1996. Biography Early life Pitman was born in 1933, at the family home in Bristol, England to Percy George Pitman and Norma Ethel née Payne . His family lived in Bedminster where Michael attended Southville Primary School in an adjacent suburb. When World War II began, Michael and his mother and brother lived in the village of East Harptree which was relatively safer from the threat of German bombs. Returning to Bedminster, Michael attended Colston's School as his father and...

#9177

Steven Michael Errede

#185066

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Steven Michael Errede is an American experimental physicist, known for his leadership in the collaboration that experimentally confirmed the existence of the top quark. Biography Errede received in 1976 his B.S. from the University of Minnesota. For some time he worked at the University of Minnesota's Space Science Center on electronic payloads for sounding rockets used in studying the composition and magnetic field of Earth's upper atmosphere. In 1976 he became a graduate student in physics at Ohio State University, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1981. From 1981 to 1984 he was a postdoc at the University of Michigan, where he worked on the IMB Proton Decay Experiment.

#9178

Anaïs Orsi

#115532

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Anais Orsi is a climate scientist studying global warming through changes in polar ice. Background Orsi received a Master's Degree in Engineering from the École Polytechnique in 2007. She then obtained a Master's Degree in Oceanography from the University of California, San Diego, and her PhD from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She travels to Antarctica to study internal weather patterns and uses them to predict future climate change.

#9179

Lawrence Schulman

#114542

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Lawrence S. Schulman is an American-Israeli physicist known for his work on path integrals, quantum measurement theory and statistical mechanics. He introduced topology into path integrals on multiply connected spaces and has contributed to diverse areas from galactic morphology to the arrow of time.

#9180

Ann-Marie Pendrill

#184447

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

K. Ann-Marie Mårtensson-Pendrill is a Swedish physicist. Originally working in atomic physics, her interests gradually shifted towards physics education, and she has published many works on the physics of playgrounds, and amusement park rides such as roller coasters, including the book Physics for the Whole Body in Playgrounds and Amusement Parks . She is a professor emeritus at the University of Gothenburg, senior professor at Lund University, and the former director of the National Resource Centre for Physics Education.

#9181

Anatol Odzijewicz

#183745

Overall Influence

1947 - 2022 (75 years)

Anatol Odzijewicz was Polish mathematician and physicist. The main areas of his research were the theory of Banach groupoidss and algebroidss related to the structure of W*-algebras, quantization of physical systems by means of the coherent state map, as well as quantum and classical integrable systems.

#9182

Mario Ojeda Gómez

#76377

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

Mario Ojeda Gómez was a Mexican scholar and internationalist. He served as President and later Professor Emeritus at El Colegio de México . He was Mexico's Ambassador to UNESCO from 1995 to 1998. Ojeda Gómez was also Investigador Nacional Emérito of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores , the México's National System of Researchers .

#9183

Miguel Ángel J. Márquez Ruiz

Miguel Ángel J. Márquez Ruiz

#121676

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Miguel Ángel J. Márquez Ruiz , is a Mexican veterinarian with over 50 years of professional practice, who has received international recognition for his contributions to veterinary medicine. He teaches at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and has carried out intensive work through the years in the areas of clinical pathology, virology, immunology and avian epidemiology.

#9184

Roy Miller

#117576

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Roy Frank Miller was a British academic, educator, physicist and university administrator. He was the Principal of Royal Holloway College of the University of London from 1982 to 1985. Early life and education Miller was born in 1935, and educated at Wembley County Grammar School. In 1957, he completed a BSc degree in physics as an external student at the University College of South-West England . He then completed a PhD in 1962 at Royal Holloway College under the supervision of Samuel Tolansky in 1962.

#9185

Amber S. Boehnlein

#185499

Overall Influence

Amber S. Boehnlein is a particle physicist, computer scientist, and administrator who has held leadership positions at several United States national laboratories and the United States Department of Energy.

#9186

Oleg Tolbanov

#171739

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Oleg Petrovich Tolbanov is a Russian physicist, specialist in solid state physics, solid-state electronics and physical materials science. He is the author of more than 160 scientific articles in the Web of Science database , including: monographs, 5 textbooks, more than 60 inventions.

#9187

Andrew McIntosh

#132943

Overall Influence

Andrew McIntosh Emeritus Professor of Thermodynamics and Combustion theory at the University of Leeds. He is also the director of the organisation Truth in Science which promotes creationism and intelligent design.

#9188

Ian Appelbaum

#186939

Overall Influence

Ian Appelbaum is an American physicist, currently at the University of Maryland and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in physics.

#9189

Krzysztof Wilmanski

Krzysztof Wilmanski

#113291

Overall Influence

1940 - 2012 (72 years)

Krzysztof Wilmanski was a Polish-German scientist working in the fields of continuum mechanics and thermodynamics. Main research fields axiomatic and kinetic foundations of continuum thermodynamics,mixture theory,phase transformations in solids,non-newtonian fluids,acoustic waves in continua,crystal plasticity and the evolution of textures,thermodynamics of porous materials.

#9190

Françoise Masnou-Seeuws

#168465

Overall Influence

Françoise Masnou-Seeuws is a French physicist, specializing in ultracold molecules. Masnou-Seeuws earned a doctorate in physics through Paris Diderot University in 1973. Subsequently, she became a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research, posted to the Laboratoire Aimé Cotton in Orsay.

#9191

Roberto Zenit

#179633

Overall Influence

Roberto Zenit is a Mexican scientist currently at the Brown University School of Engineering. Zenit previously worked at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and is an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. His field of expertise is Fluid Mechanics, including Two-Phase Flows, Non-Newtonian Fluids, the Fluid Mechanics of Painting, and Biological Flows. Recent work has also focused on studying the behaviour of Bubbly Drinks.

#9192

Cecilia Gerber

#186288

Overall Influence

Cecilia Elena Gerber is an Argentine-American experimental high-energy physicist whose research involves massive elementary particles: the top quark and Higgs boson. She is UIC Distinguished Professor of Physics and director of undergraduate studies in physics at the University of Illinois Chicago, and the co-director of the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab. Her research has included participation in the DØ experiment at Fermilab and the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in France and Switzerland.

#9193

Mercedes Vila

#141034

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Mercedes Vila Juárez is a Spanish material science researcher. She is the chief technology officer and co-founder of BioTech Foods SL. Path Mercedes Vila Juárez Vila was born in Madrid, Spain. graduated in Physics from the Autonomous University of Madrid with a doctorate in Materials Physics, in December 2003.

#9194

Aviad Frydman

#184681

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Aviad Frydman is a professor in the Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. He has been the Chairman of the Department of Physics since 2022. His research focuses on the experimental study of electronic properties in low dimensional and disordered systems.

#9195

Trevor Evans

#187054

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Trevor Evans FRS was a British physical scientist who specialised in the properties of diamonds. Evans grew up in Wales. Following national service in the RAF, he moved to the University of Bristol to study physics. He later took up a research fellowship at the University of Reading, where he would become head of the physics department and where his research career would be based. His work was supported by De Beers, a firm for which Evans acted as a consultant.

#9196

Frederick Kantor

Frederick Kantor

#117769

Overall Influence

1942 - 2020 (78 years)

Frederick Kantor was an American physicist and inventor. He is known for his early work on digital physics, originally coined by Kantor as information mechanics which described "previously thought dissimilar phenomena, such as the fine structure constant and cosmological red shift ".

#9197

May Kaftan-Kassim

#175704

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

May Arif Kaftan-Kassim , also known as May A. Kaftan, was an Iraqi radio astronomer. She trained at Harvard University, and advised on the creation of the Erbil Observatory in Iraq in the 1970s. Early life May Arif Kaftan came from a "fairly conventional, very religious Muslim family," by her own account. Her father was a government official. She attended the University of Manchester as an undergraduate and graduate student, on a scholarship for Iraqi students in the sciences. She completed her doctoral studies in astronomy at Radcliffe College in 1958, with a dissertation titled A study of neutral hydrogen in a region in Cygnus.

#9198

Philip E. Austin

#66271

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Philip E. Austin is an American economist who served as the 13th president of the University of Connecticut from October 1, 1996 to September 14, 2007. He returned to serve as interim president in May 2010 following the abrupt departure of Michael J. Hogan. Prior to UConn, Austin served as president of Colorado State University and chancellor of the University of Alabama System .

#9199

Luis Robles

#187098

Overall Influence

#9200

Anna Zakrisson

#141310

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Anna Zakrisson is a Swedish science communicator and scientist living in Berlin. Life Zakrisson grew up in Stockholm; her father was a hydrologist and her mother is a medical doctor. She moved to Fagersta Municipality in Västmanland County in 1988 and left Sweden in 1997 for journeys to California, Asia and Africa. She studied at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge and Stockholm University where she completed her doctoral thesis in 2015 entitled "External Growth Control of Baltic Sea Cyanobacteria". From 2004 to 2006 she worked as a researcher for Max-Planck-Institute Cologne. She is the mother of a daughter, born 2008.

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