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.

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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,

#9251

Martha Lux-Steiner

#167225

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Martha Christina Lux-Steiner, , is a Swiss physicist. From 1995 to 2016 she was the first female tenured professor in the department of physics at the FU Berlin. Lux-Steiner holds a Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class.

#9252

Li Tian

#150336

Overall Influence

1938 - 2018 (80 years)

Li Tian was a Chinese physicist and aircraft designer. An expert in aerodynamics for aeronautics, he served as chief scientist of the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation. He was also an adjunct professor at Beihang University.

#9253

Joachim Kuettner

Joachim Kuettner

#88251

Overall Influence

1909 - 2011 (102 years)

Joachim Kuettner , also spelled Küttner, was a German-American atmospheric scientist. Germany Born and raised in Breslau, Germany, Joachim Kuettner put his early interest in the atmosphere aside to complete a doctorate in law and economics at age 21. He worked in small-town courts and gazed at cumulus clouds while on the road. As Germany's legal and political structure deteriorated in the 1930s, Kuettner switched gears to earn a second doctorate, this time in meteorology. For his dissertation, he deployed 25 instrumented gliders to gather data on lee waves, the newly discovered features forming downwind of mountains.

#9254

Helen J. Walker

#181223

Overall Influence

1953 - 2017 (64 years)

Helen Joan Walker was a UK space scientist. Personal life She was born in Warwick on 2 January 1953. She died in Wantage, Oxfordshire, on 19 September 2017, after a five-month illness, and her funeral was in Oxfordshire on 9 October.

#9255

Junhan Cho

#188158

Overall Influence

Junhan Cho is a Korean physicist, currently at Dankook University and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.

#9256

Juerg Leuthold

#172477

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Juerg Leuthold is a full professor at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Biography Leuthold was born in 1966 in Switzerland. He received a Ph.D. degree in physics from ETH Zurich for work in the field of integrated optics and all-optical communications.

#9257

Fay Dowker

#188198

Overall Influence

#9258

Liu Baixin

#177632

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Liu Baixin ; born 10 June 1935 Upon graduating from Tsinghua University in 1961, Liu began teaching there. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1998, "[f]or outstanding contributions to the understanding of amorphous alloy formation by ion beam mixing." In 2001, Liu was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

#9259

Pan Jiluan

#171177

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Pan Jiluan was a Chinese scientist who served as president of Nanchang University, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was a representative of the 11th and 15th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

#9260

Wang Yanxin

#171426

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Wang Yanxin is a Chinese scientist and the current president of China University of Geosciences . Education Wang was born in Yuanping, Shanxi in November 1963. He secondary studied at Xiaochang No. 1 High School. After the resumption of college entrance examination, he entered Nanjing University, where he graduated in 1984. He received his master of engineering degree in hydrogeology and doctor of engineering degree in hydrogeology from China University of Geosciences in 1987 and 1990, respectively.

#9261

Lu Yuanjiu

#126317

Overall Influence

1920 - 2023 (103 years)

Lu Yuanjiu was a Chinese physicist. He was a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. Biography Lu was born in Chu County, Anhui, on 9 January 1920. His father was a teacher. He attended the Anhui Provincial No. 8 Middle School and Jiangsu Provincial Nanjing High School, and in November 1937 was accepted to the National Central University. That same year, the Imperial Japanese Army occupied north China and he escaped to Chongqing, where his university had relocated. In 1945, he pursued advanced studies in the United States on government scholarships. He earned his doctor's degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the direction of C.

#9262

Alexander Arkadyevich Migdal

Alexander Arkadyevich Migdal

#178509

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Alexander Arkadyevich Migdal is a Russian-American physicist and entrepreneur, formerly at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Space Research Institute, Princeton University, ViewPoint Corp, Magic Works LLC, and now at Migdal Research LLC.

#9263

Mary Bishai

#174144

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Mary R. M. Bishai is an American physicist who is a Distinguished Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 2023, she was elected spokesperson of Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, and was made responsible for the 1,400 person collaboration. She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015.

#9264

Marivi Fernández-Serra

#67490

Overall Influence

Maria Victoria Fernández-Serra is a Spanish condensed matter physicist known for her research applying density functional theory to the structure and dynamics of water. Other topics in her research include supercomputer simulations of the quantum-mechanical behavior of liquid-metal interfaces, the design of semiconductor-based nanowires, and the development of sensors for detecting dark matter. She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook University.

#9265

Elizabeth Rhoades

#188278

Overall Influence

Anna Elizabeth Rhoades is a molecular biophysicist at University of Pennsylvania. She is known for pioneering studies of protein folding using single-molecule techniques. Education Rhoades received her undergraduate education at Duke University, followed by Ph.D. studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in biophysics. Her dissertation supervisor was Ari Gafni.

#9266

Mykola Tomenko

#104995

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Mykola Volodymyrovych Tomenko is a Ukrainian politician. He has been a member of Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada from 2006 until 2016. In 2014, Tomenko became a member of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, which elected him to the 8th Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada on its party lists during the 2014 parliamentary election. On 25 March 2016 the party Congress of Petro Poroshenko Bloc removed Tomenko's parliamentary mandate using the Imperative mandate provisions of the Ukrainian constitution. This was considered illegal by Tomenko; on 28 July 2016 Ukraine's highest Administrative Court rejected his...

#9267

Nicholeen Viall

#188306

Overall Influence

Nicholeen Viall is an American solar physicist who is the Chair of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division. Viall is known for her work on connecting dynamics of the solar corona to dynamics of the solar wind, based on observed variability of the corona-heliosphere system with both remote-sensing instruments and in-situ probes, and for her work on understanding evolution of the plasma in the inner heliosphere. She is the mission scientist for NASA's PUNCH mission, and a co-investigator on the ISS/CODEX and Parker Solar Probe/WISPR coronal imaging instruments.

#9268

Luca Urbani

#103286

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Luca Urbani is a former ASI astronaut and was assigned as an alternate payload specialist for mission STS-78. Personal Born in Rome, Italy. He now resides in Rieti, Italy. Married to Cinzia Naccari of Senago , Italy. They have two sons. Recreational interests include flying ; gliding ; horseback-riding; skiing; tennis. He is also a licensed amateur radio operator.

#9269

Jay Gan

#41297

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Jay Jianying Gan is an American agricultural and environmental scientist. Gan is current chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences at University of California, Riverside. Biography Gan received his B.Sc. in agronomy in 1982, M.Sc. in pesticides in 1985, and Ph.D. in pesticides in 1988, all from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

#9270

Artem Atayev

#170129

Overall Influence

1938 - 2021 (83 years)

Artem Eremovich Atayev Early life Artem Eromovich Atayev was born in 1938. In 1956, he finished school with a gold medal in the city of Samarkand. In 1962 he graduated from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute while simultaneously attending the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University.

#9271

Malvin Carl Teich

#158833

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Malvin Carl Teich is an American physicist and computational neuroscientist and Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and Boston University. He is also a consultant to government, academia, and private industry, where he serves as an advisor in intellectual-property conflicts. He is the coauthor of Fundamentals of Photonics , and of Fractal-Based Point Processes .

#9272

Gordana Dukovic

#173592

Overall Influence

Gordana Dukovic is a physical chemist. She is currently a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. Life and education Gordana Dukovic earned her B.A. at Rutgers University in 2001, majoring in chemistry and minoring in Italian. In her PhD studies, she did research at Columbia University on the spectroscopy of carbon nanotubes with Louis Brus as her advisor. She was awarded a PhD in chemistry with distinction in 2006 for her thesis entitled "Electronic spectra of carbon nanotubes: excitonic states, chemical doping, and chiral interactions." After her PhD, ...

#9273

Moses Botarel Farissol

#113589

Overall Influence

Moses Botarel Farissol was a Jewish astronomer and mathematician of the second half of the 15th century. He wrote a work on the calendar entitled Meleket ha-Ḳebi'ah, and compiled, under the title Nofet Ẓufim, calendric tables. Both these works, in manuscript, are preserved in the royal library at Munich.

#9274

Steven G. Johnson

#188365

Overall Influence

#9275

Daniel Cox

#104772

Overall Influence

Daniel L. Cox is an American condensed matter physicist and biophysicist. Cox earned his doctorate from Cornell University in 1985, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego. He began teaching at Ohio State University in 1986 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to an associate professorship in 1990, and became a full professor in 1994. Cox subsequently joined the University of California, Davis in 1996. He is the lead researcher of the Cox Group. Cox was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2004, and elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2...

#9276

Edward Yao

#174474

Overall Influence

York-Peng Edward Yao is a physicist from Hong Kong. Yao is from Hong Kong. During his junior year of college, Yao received a nonresident scholarship from the University of California, Berkeley to complete his baccalaureate studies in engineering, and graduated in 1960. Yao completed his master's degree and doctorate at Harvard University, advised by Julian Schwinger, who helped Yao obtain a postdoctoral research position with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1966, Yao began teaching at the University of Michigan as an assistant professor. He became associate professor in 1972 and full professor in 1978.

#9277

Colin O'Dowd

#182603

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Colin Dermot O'Dowd is an Irish physicist and atmospheric scientist. Biography O'Dowd matriculated in 1984 at NUI Galway, and graduated there in 1987 with a B.Sc. in physics. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from UMIST . He was from 1992 to 1996 a research associate at UMIST and from 1996 to 2001 a senior research fellow at the University of Sunderland. At the University of Helsinki, he was from 2000 to 2001 a senior scientist and from 2001 to 2002 a professor of physics. At NUI Galway, he was from 2001 to 2004 an adjunct professor of physics, from 2004 to 2005 a lecturer, and from 2006 to 2009 a senior lecturer and is since 2009 a personal professor of physics.

#9278

David Melville

#181741

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Sir David Melville, is a British physicist, academic, academic administrator, and public servant. He was Vice-Chancellor of Middlesex University from 1991 to 1996, Chief executive of the Further Education Funding Council for England from 1996 to 2001, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kent from 2001 to 2007.

#9279

Wolfgang Koch

#181183

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Johann Wolfgang Koch is a German physicist and computer scientist. He teaches applied computer science at the University of Bonn, Germany, and is chief scientist of the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics. In 2011, Koch was elected a IEEE Fellow and since 2015, he has been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer

#9280

Rory Hume

#81611

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Wyatt R. "Rory" Hume is an Australian-born academic. Hume graduated from the University of Adelaide with bachelor's degrees in dentistry and dental surgery and a PhD in human physiology and pharmacology. Between 1980 and 2003, Hume's dental research demonstrated how to avoid adverse effects when applying restorative materials to dental tissue.

#9281

Antony Cooke

#181131

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Antony Cooke , is an American cellist, recording artist, former university professor, composer, and author of published books and articles on musicology and astronomy. Cooke's formal music and musicology training in London and subsequent career as a professional musician and recording artist are complemented by his intensive studies into astronomy.

#9282

J. M. A. Lenihan

#171358

Overall Influence

1918 - 1993 (75 years)

John Mark Anthony Lenihan FRSE FIP PRPSG OBE was a British clinical physicist, and science author. Life He was born in Carlisle on 23 June 1918. He was educated at Heaton Secondary School in County Durham. He studied at King's College of Durham University, graduating BSc in 1938.

#9283

Daniel Ivan Goldman

#186788

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Daniel Ivan Goldman is an experimental physicist regarded for his research on the biomechanics of animal locomotion within complex materials. Goldman is currently a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics, where he holds a Dunn Family Professorship.

#9284

Juliet Gopinath

#187722

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Juliet Tara Gopinath is an American optical engineer who studies the design and synchronization of lasers, diode laser arrays, liquid and variable-focus lenses, and other optical devices, and the properties of optical materials including optical fibers. She is Alfred T. and Betty E. Look Endowed Professor of Photonics and Quantum Engineering in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.

#9285

C. J. Stam

#188590

Overall Influence

#9286

Harold P. Hamilton

#100837

Overall Influence

1924 - 2003 (79 years)

Harold Philip Hamilton was a soldier, college president, professor, state government official and charity administrator. Early life Hamilton was born in High Point, North Carolina, the youngest of eleven children of a Methodist minister.

#9287

Alan Ernest Owen

#172823

Overall Influence

1928 - 1999 (71 years)

Alan Ernest Owen FRSE FRSC FIP was an English physicist specialising in glass technology. Life He was born on 7 October 1928 in Hastings on the Sussex coast. He studied science at the Brighton College of Technology 1949 to 1953. His initial role was as a research chemist for the English China Clay Research Laboratories at St Austell in Cornwall. He then moved to the University of Sheffield, researching the electronic qualities of glass, and gained a doctorate there . In 1959 he went to Westinghouse Electronic Systems in Baltimore in the United States, where he stayed until 1962. He then worke...

#9288

Anatoly Gromyko

Anatoly Gromyko

#36985

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

Anatoly Andreyevich Gromyko was a Soviet and Russian scientist and diplomat. He specialized in American and African studies as well as international relations, and was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Union of Russian Artists.

#9289

Ruth Mottram

#187531

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Ruth Mottram is a British climate scientist who is a researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute. Her research considers the development of climate models and the dynamics of glaciers and ice sheets in the climate system.

#9290

Yashwant Singh

#187003

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Yashwant Singh is an Indian theoretical physicist known for his contributions to soft matter physics. He is at present Distinguished Professor and INSA Senior Scientist at Banaras Hindu University. Biography Dr. Yashwant Singh born on 28 July 1944 in a village near Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. He completed his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from Gorakhpur University in 1962 and 1964. He then joined Indian Association for the Cultivation of Sciences , Jadavpur, Kolkata, where he worked on transport phenomenon in gaseous state and obtained D. Phil. from Calcutta University . He started his profession...

#9291

Anthony Kelly

#85065

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Anthony Elliott-Kelly FAcSS or Anthony Kelly, better known as Tony Kelly, is an Irish academic who is currently Professor of Education at the University of Southampton, England. Education and career Kelly attended the National University of Ireland, Queens' College, Cambridge and Trinity College, Cambridge.

#9292

Sreenivasan

#188622

Overall Influence

#9293

Gerd Ulrich Nienhaus

#182769

Overall Influence

Gerd Ulrich "Uli" Nienhaus is a German physicist who is a professor and director of the Institute of Applied Physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology . At the KIT, he is also affiliated with the Institute of Nanotechnology, Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems, and Institute of Physical Chemistry, and he is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

#9294

Katarina Cicak

#117753

Overall Influence

Katarina Cicak is a physicist. She is a researcher in the advanced microwave photonics group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Early life and education Cicak was born in 1974 in Derventa in former Yugoslavia. In 1992 during the war in Yugoslavia, she relocated to Croatia then to the United States as a refugee.

#9295

Albert Tarantola

Albert Tarantola

#166670

Overall Influence

1949 - 2009 (60 years)

Albert Tarantola was a Spanish-born physicist , of the University of Paris and the Institut de Physique du Globe , and author of the book Probabilistic Formulation of Inverse Problems . Tarantola was the leader of the Geophysical Tomography Group, that during the years 1985—2000 developed methods for the interpretation of seismic waveform data. Beyond just this field, he is widely credited with popularizing the idea that inverse problems can be interpreted in a statistical sense, yielding the Bayesian perspective of inverse problems. Apart from his scientific research, Tarantola taught both at...

#9296

Ileana Chinnici

#188062

Overall Influence

Ileana Chinnici is an Italian historian of astronomy, book author, and biographer, whose biography of Angelo Secchi won the 2021 Osterbrock Book Prize of the American Astronomical Society. Education and career Chinnici earned a degree in physics in 1992 from the University of Palermo with a dissertation concerning Italian astronomer Pietro Tacchini, supervised by Giorgia Foderà. After working as a secondary school teacher, and a visiting position at the Paris Observatory, she joined the Palermo Astronomical Observatory as a research fellow in 1995, and became curator of the observatory's museum of astronomy in 1996.

#9297

Mildred Widgoff

#188659

Overall Influence

1924 - 2004 (80 years)

Mildred Widgoff was an American experimental particle physicist and astroparticle physicist who became the first female faculty member at the Brown University physics department. Life Mildred Widgoff was born in Buffalo, New York, on August 24, 1924, graduated from the University at Buffalo in 1944 with a bachelor's degree in physics, and came to work for the Manhattan Project in the SAM Laboratories at Columbia University. She earned a Ph.D. in 1952 studying cosmic rays at Cornell University with Giuseppe Cocconi and Kenneth Greisen; her dissertation was Neutrons from Interactions of Mu Meso...

#9298

Sergei Ipatov

#187658

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Sergei Ivanovich Ipatov is a Soviet, Russian, and American scientist, laureate of the F. A. Bredikhin Prize in astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Asteroid 14360 Ipatov was named in his honor.

#9299

J. Ritchie Patterson

#186969

Overall Influence

Ritchie Patterson is a physicist at Cornell University known for her research using the Large Hadron Collider to examine dark matter and the disappearance of antimatter. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#9300

Chen-Yu Liu

#188719

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Chen-Yu Liu is a Taiwanese physicist. Chen earned a bachelor's degree from National Taiwan University in 1997, then a doctorate at Princeton University in 2002. After defending her dissertation, A superthermal ultra-cold neutron source, Chen completed a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She began teaching at Indiana University Bloomington in 2005, and was appointed the James H. Rudy Professor of Physics. She received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2007, and was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018, for her research into experim...

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