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,

#9551

Jasur Rizayev

#175455

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Jasur Alimjanovich Rizayev is an Uzbek scientist, a doctor of medical sciences, professor. The rector of Samarkand State Medical Institute is one of the oldest institutions of higher education in Uzbekistan. He is the author of numerous textbooks and manuals for medical students.

#9552

Rusty Roberts

#85858

Overall Influence

Rusty Roberts is the director of the Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, a position he has held since April 2009. Education Roberts received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from West Point in 1978, a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1985, and a master of business administration in finance from Long Island University in 1987.

#9553

Gilles Cloutier

#143115

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Gilles George Cloutier, was a Canadian physicist and former director of the Alberta Research Council. Early life and education Born in Quebec City, he was educated at Université Laval and McGill University.

#9554

Brian G. W. Manning

#133291

Overall Influence

1926 - 2011 (85 years)

Brian George William Manning was an English astronomer who discovered 19 minor planets. He was born in 1926 in Birmingham. He constructed his first mirror from a piece of glass that a World War II bomb blew out of the roof of the factory where his father worked. He began as an engineering draughtsman but later became a metrologist at the University of Birmingham. In the late 1950s, he constructed an interference-controlled ruling machine in a home workshop, which was able to rule high-quality 3 by 2 inch gratings. In 1990, he received the H. E. Dall prize of the BAA.

#9555

Howard Y. Chang

#59568

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Howard Yuan-Hao Chang is a Taiwan-born American physician-scientist. He is the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Genomics and of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

#9556

Allen Adler

#192424

Overall Influence

Edward Allen Adler is an American businessman and physicist, who as of 2017 was the vice president of Enterprise Technology Strategy for The Boeing Company. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, with the citation:

#9557

Wolfgang Ries

#192452

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Wolfgang Ries is an Austrian amateur astronomer, astrophotographer and discoverer of minor planets. Ries has his own private observatory at Altschwendt in the Austrian state of Upper Austria. The Minor Planet Center credits him with discovering numerous asteroids since 2004 and 2009.

#9558

François Mignard

#129025

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

François Mignard is a French astronomer and the director of the CERGA Observatory of the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in southern France. He is an expert in space astrometry and Solar System dynamics, and played major roles in the European Space Agency's Hipparcos and Gaia missions. Mignard is an active member in several commissions of the International Astronomical Union and chairman of its working group that amends the standards for the International Celestial Reference System.

#9559

Frank B. Zoltowski

#187226

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Frank B. Zoltowski is an Australian amateur astronomer and prolific discoverer of minor planets who lives in Woomera, South Australia. In 1998, he was awarded a "Gene Shoemaker NEO Grant" for improved near-Earth object searches.

#9560

Jacqueline Zadoc-Kahn Eisenmann

#159080

Overall Influence

1904 - 1998 (94 years)

Jacqueline Zadoc-Kahn Eisenmann was a French physicist. She was born in Paris to Suzanne Lang and Dr. Léon Zadoc-Kahn, former Chief Medical Officer of the Rothschild Hospital in Paris and president of the central committee of Keren haYesod France. Her grandfather was Zadoc Kahn, the chief rabbi of France.

#9561

William Kwong Yu Yeung

#88569

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

William Kwong Yu Yeung is a Hong Kong-born, Canadian amateur astronomer with telescopes based in the United States. He is a prolific discoverer of asteroids and also discovered the comet 172P/Yeung. He also discovered the object J002E3, which was first thought to be an asteroid, but is now known to be part of a Saturn V Rocket that propelled Apollo 12 into space. He worked first from "Rock Finder Observatory" in Calgary, Alberta, and now works from Arizona's Desert Beaver Observatory and Desert Eagle Observatory .

#9562

Loren C. Ball

#99652

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Loren C. Ball is an American amateur astronomer, who has discovered more than 100 asteroids while working at his Emerald Lane Observatory , built on the roof of his house on Emerald Lane, Decatur, Alabama. As of 2021, he has credit for 108 numbered designations with the Minor Planet Center at Harvard for the period between 2000 and 2004. None of them were co-discoveries. He is under contract with NASA through the University of Alabama in Huntsville to do outreach to school groups and organisations. , he promotes asteroid education in schools and on social media.

#9563

Xavier Barcons

#192446

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Xavier Barcons Jáuregui is a Spanish physicist and astronomer appointed as ESO director general from 1 September 2017. On 29 May 2018, the asteroid 327943 Xavierbarcons was named in his honor. See also European Southern Observatory

#9564

John Broughton

#169235

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

John Broughton is an Australian amateur astronomer and artist. He is among the most prolific discoverers of minor planets worldwide, credited by the Minor Planet Center with more than a thousand discoveries made between 1997 and 2008. His observations are done at Reedy Creek Observatory , in Queensland, Australia.

#9565

John V. McClusky

#131090

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

John V. McClusky is an American astronomer. He is a prolific discoverer of asteroids. List of discovered minor planets See also List of minor planet discoverers

#9566

Jaume Nomen

#173417

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Jaume Nomen Torres is a Spanish oral and maxillofacial surgeon, amateur astronomer, and discoverer of numerous minor planets. He is of Catalan origin and became publicly known for the discovery of the near-Earth asteroid by the OAM team during the La Sagra Sky Survey. The asteroid 56561 Jaimenomen is named after him.

#9567

Ruth Stokes

1890 - 1968 (78 years)

Ruth Wyckliffe Stokes was an American mathematician, cryptologist, and astronomer. She earned the first doctorate in mathematics from Duke University, made pioneering contributions to the theory of linear programming, and founded the Pi Mu Epsilon journal.

#9568

Pavel Molchanov

1893 - 1941 (48 years)

Pavel Alexandrovich Molchanov was a Soviet Russian meteorologist and the inventor of the first Russian radiosonde in 1930, while the French Pierre Idrac and Robert Bureau were the first to develop the radiosonde in 1929.

#9569

Fanny Gates

1872 - 1931 (59 years)

Fanny Cook Gates was an American physicist, an American Physical Society fellow and American Mathematical Society member. She made contributions to the research of radioactive materials, determining that radioactivity could not be destroyed by heat or ionization due to chemical reactions, and that radioactive materials differ from phosphorescent materials both qualitatively and quantitatively. More specifically, Gates showed that the emission of blue light from quinine was temperature dependent, providing evidence that the emitted light is produced from phosphorescence rather than radioactive decay.

#9570

Paul Harzer

1857 - 1932 (75 years)

Paul Harzer was a German mathematician and astronomer best known for his papers arguing with Albert Einstein regarding the Sagnac effect and its relationship to Special Relativity. Harzer was Professor of Astronomy at the University of Kiel and Director of its observatory. His published article on the experiment of Franz Harress drew two reply articles from Einstein.

#9571

Samson Kutateladze

Samson Kutateladze

1914 - 1986 (72 years)

Samson Semyonovich Kutateladze was a Soviet heat physicist and hydrodynamist. Biography Early life Kutateladze's parents divorced when he was four, and he was raised by his mother, Aleksandra Vladimirovna, an obstetric nurse. His father, Semyon Samsonovich, had been a nobleman; he was before the October Revolution a student at Petrograd University and then an army officer. He was arrested in 1937 and died in a camp near Novosibirsk. Following the divorce, Kutateladze and his mother lived for a few years in Georgia, returning in 1922 to Petrograd.

#9572

George Adolphus Schott

1868 - 1937 (69 years)

George Adolphus Schott FRS was a British mathematician. He is best known for developing the full theory of radiation from electrons travelling at close to the speed of light. Born in Bradford to German parents, he was educated at Bradford Grammar School and later studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1890. After obtaining his Doctor of Science he became assistant lecturer to D.M. Lewis in the Department of Physics. After a years leave, in which he travelled to Germany, he became lecturer of Applied Mathematics at Aberystwyth University, where he would spend the rest of his career.

#9573

Yrjö Väisälä

1891 - 1971 (80 years)

Yrjö Väisälä was a Finnish astronomer and physicist. His main contributions were in the field of optics. He was also active in geodetics, astronomy and optical metrology. He had an affectionate nickname of Wizard of Tuorla , and a book with the same title in Finnish describes his works. His discoveries include 128 minor planets and 3 comets.

#9574

Jean Bosler

1878 - 1973 (95 years)

Jean Bosler was a French astronomer and author of several books. Recruited by Deslandres as an astronomer at l’observatoire de Paris, Bosler discovered in 1908 in the spectrum of Comet Morehouse the spectral lines of ionized nitrogen, which was the first evidence of that element in comets. Much of his research was on the physical properties and orbits of comets. He made a report on progress in astrophysics in the United States for the 1910 annual report of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1912, he showed in his doctoral dissertation that the Sun’s magnetic field, by means of the intermediary ...

#9575

John Augustine Zahm

John Augustine Zahm

1851 - 1921 (70 years)

The Rev. John Augustine Zahm , CSC was a Holy Cross priest, author, scientist, and explorer of South America. He was born at New Lexington, Ohio, and died in Munich, Germany. Early life Zahm was born on June 14, 1851 in a log home in Jackson Township, Perry County, Ohio to John and Mary Zahm. His mother was born in Pennsylvania and was of English descent, having Edward Braddock as an ancestor. His father was an immigrant to the United States from Olsberg, Germany.

#9576

Knut Lundmark

1889 - 1958 (69 years)

Knut Emil Lundmark , was a Swedish astronomer, professor of astronomy and head of the observatory at Lund University from 1929 to 1955. Lundmark received his astronomical education at the observatory of Uppsala University. His dissertation was titled: The relations of the globular clusters and spiral nebulae to the stellar system. During the 1920s he worked at several observatories in the USA, mainly the Lick Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory.

#9577

Friedrich Hayn

1863 - 1928 (65 years)

Friedrich Karl Traugott Hayn was a German astronomer. Biography Hayn was born in Auerbach, Saxony, in 1863, the son of a pastor. He attended high school in Dresden. From 1883 to 1888, he studied astronomy at Leipzig University and the University of Göttingen. In 1888, he received his doctorate from Göttingen after determining the orbit of Comet Swift–Tuttle, which had been discovered in 1862. In 1891, he became an assistant at Leipzig Observatory. In 1920, he turned down an offer from the Koenigsberg Observatory, and became an associate professor at Leipzig. Throughout his career, he surveyed, among other things, the Pleiades cluster and certain rotational elements of the moon.

#9578

Theodor Kaluza

1885 - 1954 (69 years)

Theodor Franz Eduard Kaluza was a German mathematician and physicist known for the Kaluza–Klein theory, involving field equations in five-dimensional space-time. His idea that fundamental forces can be unified by introducing additional dimensions were reused much later for string theory.

#9579

Prosper-René Blondlot

Prosper-René Blondlot

1849 - 1930 (81 years)

Prosper-René Blondlot was a French physicist, who in 1891 made the first measurement of the speed of radio waves, but is now mostly remembered for his "discovery" of N rays, a phenomenon that subsequently proved to be illusory.

#9580

Friedrich Karl Ginzel

1850 - 1926 (76 years)

Friedrich Karl Ginzel was an Austrian astronomer. From 1877 Ginzel worked at the observatory in Vienna. In 1886, he became a member of the Königlichen Astronomischen Recheninstituts in Berlin, where he was offered a professorship in 1899.

#9581

Richard Börnstein

Richard Börnstein

1852 - 1913 (61 years)

Richard Börnstein was a German physicist and meteorologist. Born into a Jewish family in Königsberg, he studied natural sciences at the University of Göttingen, and later on, worked as an assistant to Georg Hermann Quincke at the University of Heidelberg. In 1877 he obtained his habilitation at Heidelberg, and afterwards taught classes in experimental physics and meteorology at the Agricultural Academy in Proskau. From 1881 onward, he served as a professor at the Agricultural University of Berlin.

#9582

Paul Drude

1863 - 1906 (43 years)

Paul Karl Ludwig Drude was a German physicist specializing in optics. He wrote a fundamental textbook integrating optics with James Clerk Maxwell's theories of electromagnetism. Education Born into an ethnic German family, the son of a physician in Braunschweig, Drude began his studies in mathematics at the University of Göttingen, but later changed his major to physics. His dissertation covering the reflection and diffraction of light in crystals was completed in 1887, under Woldemar Voigt.

#9583

Gyula Farkas

1847 - 1930 (83 years)

Gyula Farkas de Kisbarnak or Julius Farkas de Kisbarnak was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist. Biography Farkas was born on March 28, 1847, in Sárosd, Hungary. He was the eldest of seven children in a Roman Catholic Hungarian noble family Farkas de Kisbarnak, which can trace back their origins to the first half of the 17th century. His father was Farkas Ferenc de Kisbarnak , administrator of the states of Réde, property of the county Esterházys; his mother was Cecília Hoffmann . His paternal grandparents were János Farkas de Kisbarnak , state administrator of Súr and Anna Fiber. His maternal grandparents were István Hoffmann, states cashier and Rozália Vitmáier.

#9584

Eugène Cosserat

Eugène Cosserat

1866 - 1931 (65 years)

Eugène-Maurice-Pierre Cosserat was a French mathematician and astronomer. Born in Amiens, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1883 to 1888. He was on Science faculty of Toulouse University from 1889 and director of its observatory from 1908, a position he held for the rest of his life. He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1919.

#9585

Isaac Newton

1642 - 1727 (85 years)

Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book , first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus, though notably he developed calculus well before Leibniz.

#9586

Ptolemy

100 - 170 (70 years)

Claudius Ptolemy was an Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis or Mathematical Treatise, and later known as The Greatest Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treat...

#9587

Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford

1871 - 1937 (66 years)

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, was a New Zealand physicist who was a pioneering researcher in both atomic and nuclear physics. Rutherford has been described as "the father of nuclear physics", and "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday". In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances." He was the first Oceanian Nobel laureate, and the first to perform the awarded work in Canada.

#9588

Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

1918 - 1988 (70 years)

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.

#9589

Ernst Abbe

1840 - 1905 (65 years)

Ernst Karl Abbe was a German physicist, optical scientist, entrepreneur, and social reformer. Together with Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss, he developed numerous optical instruments. He was also a co-owner of Carl Zeiss AG, a German manufacturer of scientific microscopes, astronomical telescopes, planetariums, and other advanced optical systems.

#9590

John Couch Adams

John Couch Adams

1819 - 1892 (73 years)

John Couch Adams was a British mathematician and astronomer. He was born in Laneast, near Launceston, Cornwall, and died in Cambridge. His most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton. At the same time, but unknown to each other, the same calculations were made by Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier would send his coordinates to Berlin Observatory astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle, who confirmed the existence of the planet on 23 Septemb...

#9591

Joseph Henry

1797 - 1878 (81 years)

Joseph Henry was an American scientist who served as the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was the secretary for the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution. He also served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1868 to 1878.

#9592

Giovanni Domenico Cassini

Giovanni Domenico Cassini

1625 - 1712 (87 years)

Giovanni Domenico Cassini, also known as Jean-Dominique Cassini was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the Savoyard state. Cassini is known for his work on astronomy and engineering. He discovered four satellites of the planet Saturn and noted the division of the rings of Saturn; the Cassini Division was named after him. Giovanni Domenico Cassini was also the first of his family to begin work on the project of creating a topographic map of France.

#9593

François Arago

1786 - 1853 (67 years)

Dominique François Jean Arago , known simply as François Arago , was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, freemason, supporter of the Carbonari revolutionaries and politician. Early life and work Arago was born at Estagel, a small village of 3,000 near Perpignan, in the of Pyrénées-Orientales, France, where his father held the position of Treasurer of the Mint. His parents were François Bonaventure Arago and Marie Arago .

#9594

Anders Jonas Ångström

Anders Jonas Ångström

1814 - 1874 (60 years)

Anders Jonas Ångström was a Swedish physicist and one of the founders of the science of spectroscopy. Ångström is also well known for his studies of astrophysics, heat transfer, terrestrial magnetism, and the aurora borealis. In 1852, Ångström formulated in Optiska undersökningar , a law of absorption, later modified somewhat and known as Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation.

#9595

Henry Moseley

1887 - 1915 (28 years)

Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra.

#9596

Franz Xaver von Zach

Franz Xaver von Zach

1754 - 1832 (78 years)

Baron Franz Xaver von Zach was a Hungarian astronomer born at Pest, Hungary . Biography Zach studied physics at the Royal University of Pest, and served for some time in the Austrian army. He taught at the University of Lemberg and worked in its observatory. He lived in Paris in 1780–83, and in London from 1783 to 1786 as tutor in the house of the Saxon ambassador, Hans Moritz von Brühl. In Paris and London he entered the circles of astronomers like Joseph de Lalande, Pierre-Simon Laplace and William Herschel. In 1786 he was appointed by Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg director of the new observatory on Seeberg hill at Gotha, which was finished in 1791.

#9597

Johann Heinrich Lambert

Johann Heinrich Lambert

1728 - 1777 (49 years)

Johann Heinrich Lambert was a polymath from the Republic of Mulhouse, generally identified as either Swiss or French, who made important contributions to the subjects of mathematics, physics , philosophy, astronomy and map projections.

#9598

August Ferdinand Möbius

August Ferdinand Möbius

1790 - 1868 (78 years)

August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer. Early life and education Möbius was born in Schulpforta, Electorate of Saxony, and was descended on his mother's side from religious reformer Martin Luther. He was home-schooled until he was 13, when he attended the college in Schulpforta in 1803, and studied there, graduating in 1809. He then enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he studied astronomy under the mathematician and astronomer Karl Mollweide. In 1813, he began to study astronomy under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Göttingen, while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory.

#9599

Gunnar Nordström

Gunnar Nordström

1881 - 1923 (42 years)

Gunnar Nordström was a Finnish theoretical physicist best remembered for his theory of gravitation, which was an early competitor of general relativity. Nordström is often designated by modern writers as The Einstein of Finland due to his novel work in similar fields with similar methods to Einstein.

#9600

Woldemar Voigt

1850 - 1919 (69 years)

Woldemar Voigt was a German physicist, who taught at the Georg August University of Göttingen. Voigt eventually went on to head the Mathematical Physics Department at Göttingen and was succeeded in 1914 by Peter Debye, who took charge of the theoretical department of the Physical Institute. In 1921, Debye was succeeded by Max Born.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions