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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.

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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#1051

Ian Affleck

#26040

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Ian Keith Affleck is a Canadian physicist specializing in condensed matter physics. He is Killam University Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia. Work Ian Affleck currently studies theoretical aspects of condensed matter physics, including high temperature superconductivity, low dimensional magnetism, quantum dots and quantum wires.

#1052

Pierre Sikivie

#36997

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Pierre Sikivie is an American theoretical physicist and currently the Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He invented the axion haloscope and the axion helioscope and has played an important role in the development of axion cosmology.

#1053

Artur Ekert

#10332

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Artur Konrad Ekert is a British-Polish professor of quantum physics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, professorial fellow in quantum physics and cryptography at Merton College, Oxford, Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore and the founding director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies . His research interests extend over most aspects of information processing in quantum-mechanical systems, with a focus on quantum communication and quantum computation. He is best known as one of the pioneers of quantum cryptography.

#1054

Christopher McKee

#35738

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Christopher Fulton McKee is an astrophysicist. McKee attended Phillips Academy and Harvard University, and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970 under advisor George B. Field. In 1974, he was appointed Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has been chair of the UCB Physics Department. He is a former member and chairman of the NASA Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee and former Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at UCB.

#1055

Rachael Padman

#19060

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Rachael Padman is an Australian physics lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England. From Melbourne, Padman was a graduate in electrical engineering from Monash University, Australia, and specialised in radio astronomy. After her doctoral research, she has made contributions to research in stellar evolution . She is now mainly involved in administrative works in teaching. Padman is a member of the International Astronomical Union.

#1056

Berni Alder

#13921

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Berni Julian Alder was a German-born American physicist specialized in statistical mechanics, and a pioneer of computational modelling of matter. Biography Alder was born in Duisburg, Prussia, in September 1925, to Jewish parents, a chemist and a homemaker. After the Nazis came to power, the family moved to Zurich, Switzerland. Fearing an invasion by Nazi Germany after the outbreak of World War II, the family applied for a visa to the United States, which was granted in 1941. They left by sealed train from neutral Switzerland to Spain, then to Portugal, where they took a ship to the US. Foll...

#1057

Masao Doi

#28901

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

is a Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University and The University of Tokyo. He is a Fellow of the Toyota Physical and Chemical Research Institute. In 1978 and 1979 he wrote a series of papers with Sir Sam Edwards expanding on the concept of reptation introduced by Pierre-Gilles de Gennes in 1971. In 1996 he authored the textbook Introduction to Polymer Physics.

#1058

Fulvio Melia

#10565

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Fulvio Melia is an Italian-American astrophysicist, cosmologist and author. He is professor of physics, astronomy and the applied math program at the University of Arizona and was a scientific editor of The Astrophysical Journal and an associate editor of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. A former Presidential Young Investigator and Sloan Research Fellow, he is the author of six English books and 230 refereed articles on theoretical astrophysics and cosmology.

#1059

David B. Kaplan

#28126

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

David B. Kaplan is an American physicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of Washington, where he was director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory during the period 2006–2016 and is now a senior fellow.

#1060

Alan Andrew Watson

Alan Andrew Watson

#30708

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Alan Andrew Watson, FRS, is a physicist and an emeritus professor at the University of Leeds, England. Education Watson was educated at the University of Edinburgh and was awarded the degree of PhD in 1964 for his thesis on the physics of condensation of water vapour: Examination and possible exploitation of certain unexplored features in the operation of high pressure cloud chambers. After completing his PhD, he took up a lectureship at the University of Leeds in 1964. His main areas of interest are high-energy cosmic rays, ultra high-energy gamma rays and high-energy astrophysics.

#1061

Vladimir Paar

#28388

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Vladimir Paar is a Croatian physicist and university professor. Paar was born in Zagreb. He graduated from the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, where he is currently a professor emeritus. He is a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1992.

#1062

Piet Hut

#14625

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Piet Hut is a Dutch-American astrophysicist, who divides his time between research in computer simulations of dense stellar systems and broadly interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from other fields in natural science to computer science, cognitive psychology and philosophy.

#1063

Donald Edward Osterbrock

#38239

Overall Influence

1924 - 2007 (83 years)

Donald Edward Osterbrock was an American astronomer, best known for his work on star formation and on the history of astronomy. Biography Osterbrock was born in Cincinnati. His father was an electrical engineer. He served with the US Army in the Second World War, making weather observations in the Pacific. He did undergraduate classes in physics at the University of Chicago as part of his weather training.

#1064

Vladimir Braginsky

#23921

Overall Influence

1931 - 2016 (85 years)

Vladimir Borisovich Braginsky was a Russian experimental and theoretical physicist and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences , and foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

#1065

Guinevere Kauffmann

#25066

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Guinevere Alice Mei-Ing Kauffmann was born in California. She is an astrophysicist and is known for her work studying galaxies among other subjects. Academic career Kauffmann obtained a B.Sc. in applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town in 1988 and an M.Sc. in astronomy in 1990. She obtained her Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Cambridge in 1993, working with Simon White, whom she later married.

#1066

Slava Turyshev

#25621

Overall Influence

Vyacheslav Gennadievich Turyshev is a Russian physicist now working in the US at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory . He is known for his investigations of the Pioneer anomaly, affecting Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, and for his attempt to recover early data of the Pioneer spacecraft to shed light on such a phenomenon.

#1067

James E. Pringle

#38072

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

James Edward Pringle is a British astrophysicist. He is a professor of theoretical astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge part of the University of Cambridge. His research is focused mainly on astrophysical fluid dynamics and accretion discs, including, for example, the formation of stars and planets, accretion of matter onto black holes, and formation of jets by accretion flows. In a 1984 paper, he and John Papaloizou showed that accretion disks in anisotropic stellar systems with constant specific angular momentum are unstable to non-axisymmetric global modes. This phenomenon is...

#1068

Jenny Nelson

#28769

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Areas of Specialization: Photovoltaic Cells, Multi-scale Modelling of Molecular Electronic Materials Jenny Nelson is Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. Irish by birth, Nelson received her undergraduate education from Churchill College, University of Cambridge. In 1988, she obtained her PhD in physics from the University of Bristol. She wrote her dissertation on the optics of fractal clusters under the supervision of Michael Berry. Since arriving at Imperial College London, Nelson has been associated with the Blackett Laboratory in the Faculty of Natural Sciences, as well as with the Grantham Institute—Climate Change and the Environment.

#1069

Esther M. Conwell

#14808

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Esther Marley Conwell was a pioneering American chemist and physicist, best known for the Conwell-Weisskopf theory that describes how electrons travel through semiconductors, a breakthrough that helped revolutionize modern computing. During her life, she was described as one of the most important women in science.

#1070

Jochen Heisenberg

Jochen Heisenberg

#24727

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Jochen Heisenberg is a German physicist specializing in nuclear physics, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of New Hampshire. He is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was a co-founder of the quantum mechanics, and who, in particular, introduced the uncertainty principle. He is the brother of German neurobiologist and geneticist Martin Heisenberg and the uncle of film director Benjamin Heisenberg.

#1071

Katherine Freese

Katherine Freese

#29453

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Katherine Freese is a theoretical astrophysicist. She is currently a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she holds the Jeff and Gail Kodosky Endowed Chair in Physics. She is known for her work in theoretical cosmology at the interface of particle physics and astrophysics.

#1072

Chris Adami

#15755

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Christoph Carl Herbert "Chris" Adami is a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, as well as professor of physics and astronomy, at Michigan State University. Education Adami was born in Brussels, Belgium, and graduated from the European School of Brussels I. He obtained a Diplom in physics from the University of Bonn and an MA and a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics from Stony Brook University in 1991. Adami was a Division Prize Fellow in the lab of Steven E. Koonin at the California Institute of Technology from 1992-1995, and was subsequently on the Caltech faculty as a senior ...

#1073

Yuri Osipyan

#12073

Overall Influence

1931 - 2008 (77 years)

Yuri Andreevich Osipyan was a Soviet, Russian-Armenian physicist who worked in the field of solid state physics. Osipyan was born in Moscow and graduated from Georgi Kurdyumov's class at Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys in 1955. His first scientific work pu. Later, he summarized his interest in science: In late 1950s and 1960s Osipyan worked on the extended effects of interaction of electrons with solid matter and discovered the effect of optical excitation of plastic properties in semiconductors. Also in 1960s Osipyan released his theory of dislocations in semiconductor crystal structure...

#1074

R. Paul Butler

#35120

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Robert Paul Butler is an astronomer and staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who searches for extrasolar planets. he and his team have discovered over half of the planets found orbiting nearby stars. He is noted for his pioneering work in Doppler spectroscopy, a method used to detect stars having orbiting planets by measuring the "wobble" induced by the gravitational forces between the star and its orbiting planet.

#1075

Andreas Acrivos

Andreas Acrivos

#11573

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Andreas Acrivos is the Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Engineering, emeritus at the City College of New York. He is also the director of the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physicochemical Hydrodynamics.

#1076

John Young

#1964

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

John Watts Young was an American astronaut, naval officer and aviator, test pilot, and aeronautical engineer. He became the 9th person to walk on the Moon as commander of the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. He is the only astronaut to fly on four different classes of spacecraft: Gemini, the Apollo command and service module, the Apollo Lunar Module and the Space Shuttle.

#1077

Petra Schwille

#9183

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Petra Schwille is a German professor and a researcher in the area of biophysics. Since 2011, she has been a director of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. She is known for her ground-laying work in the field of fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy, and numerous contributions on model membranes. Her current research focuses around bottom-up approaches to building an artificial cell within a broader area of synthetic biology. In 2010, Schwille received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.

#1078

Duncan J. Watts

Duncan J. Watts

#3485

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Duncan James Watts is a sociologist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was formerly a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, and is known for his work on small-world networks.

#1079

Karl-Heinz Höcker

#30501

Overall Influence

1915 - 1998 (83 years)

Karl-Heinz Höcker was a German theoretical nuclear physicist who worked in the German Uranverein. After World War II, he worked at the university of Stuttgart and was the founder of the Institut für Kernenergetik und Energiesysteme.

#1080

Norman Alexander

#12175

Overall Influence

1907 - 1997 (90 years)

Sir Norman Stanley Alexander was a New Zealand physicist instrumental in the establishment of many Commonwealth universities, including Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, and the Universities of the West Indies, the South Pacific and Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. He was knighted in 1966.

#1081

Xiaowei Zhuang

#11274

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Xiaowei Zhuang is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy , a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffr...

#1082

Caleb Scharf

#34347

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Caleb Asa Scharf is a British-American astronomer and popular science author. He is currently the senior scientist for astrobiology at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He formerly served as the director of the multidisciplinary Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University, New York.

#1083

John D. Kraus

#19432

Overall Influence

1910 - 2004 (94 years)

John Daniel Kraus was an American physicist known for his contributions to electromagnetics, radio astronomy, and antenna theory. His inventions included the helical antenna, the corner reflector antenna, and several other types of antennas. He designed the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University, which was constructed mostly by a team of OSU students and was used to carry out the Ohio Sky Survey. Kraus held a number of patents and published widely.

#1084

John S. Toll

#19841

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

John Sampson Toll was an American physicist and educational administrator. Education Toll received his bachelor's degree in physics from Yale University in 1944, after which he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He finished his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton in 1952.

#1085

Catherine Coleman

Catherine Coleman

#8360

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Catherine Grace "Cady" Coleman is an American chemist, engineer, former United States Air Force colonel, and retired NASA astronaut. She is a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions, and departed the International Space Station on May 23, 2011, as a crew member of Expedition 27 after logging 159 days in space.

#1086

Ernan McMullin

#12254

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Ernan McMullin was an Irish philosopher who last served as the O’Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He was an internationally respected philosopher of science who has written and lectured extensively on subjects ranging from the relationship between cosmology and theology, to the role of values in understanding science, to the impact of Darwinism on Western religious thought. He is the only person to ever hold the presidency of four of the major US philosophical associations. He was an expert on the life of Galileo.

#1087

John Clayton Taylor

#10579

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

John Clayton Taylor is a British mathematical physicist. He is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Robinson College. He is the father of mathematician Richard Taylor.

#1088

Semion Braude

#25682

Overall Influence

1911 - 2003 (92 years)

Semion Yakovlevich Braude was a Soviet and Ukrainian physicist and radio astronomer. Of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, Braude was born in Poltava, Ukraine, and pursued his higher education at the National University of Kharkiv, receiving his undergraduate degree from the Physics and Mathematics Department in 1932. He then joined the staff of the Laboratory of Electromagnetic Oscillations at the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute , and also began graduate work at KU. His mentor was Abram A. Slutskin, professor at KU as well as head of the LEMO.

#1089

Jean Bricmont

#1396

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jean Bricmont is a Belgian theoretical physicist and philosopher of science. Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain , he works on renormalization group and nonlinear differential equations. Since 2004, He is a member of the Division of Sciences of the Royal Academy of Belgium.

#1090

Brosl Hasslacher

#4903

Overall Influence

1941 - 2005 (64 years)

Brosl Hasslacher was a theoretical physicist. Brosl Hasslacher was born in New York City in 1941 and obtained a bachelor's in physics from Harvard University in 1962. He did his Ph.D. with D.Z. Freeman and C.N. Yang at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After having several postdoctoral and research positions at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Caltech, ENS in Paris, and CERN, he settled for more than twenty years at the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There he was involved in theoretical, experimental, and numerical work in theo...

#1091

Shiraz Minwalla

Shiraz Minwalla

#15748

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Shiraz Naval Minwalla is an Indian theoretical physicist and string theorist. He is a faculty member in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. Prior to his present position, Minwalla was a Harvard Junior Fellow and subsequently an assistant professor at Harvard University.

#1092

Jeremy England

#12176

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Jeremy England is an American physicist who uses statistical physics arguments to explain the spontaneous emergence of life, and consequently, the modern synthesis of evolution. England terms this process "dissipation-driven adaptation".

#1093

Warren Siegel

#17750

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Warren Siegel is a theoretical physicist specializing in supersymmetric quantum field theory and string theory. He was a professor at the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University. He retired in Fall of 2022.

#1094

George Rochester

#27341

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

George Dixon Rochester, FRS was a British physicist known for having co-discovered, with Sir Clifford Charles Butler, a subatomic particle called the kaon. Biography Rochester was born in Wallsend, the only child of Thomas Rochester, a blacksmith, who was later a toolsmith in the Swan Hunter shipyard, and his wife, Ellen, née Dixon.

#1095

Melvin Lax

#29138

Overall Influence

1922 - 2002 (80 years)

Melvin Lax was a distinguished professor of physics at City College of New York and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, and notable for his contributions to research of random processes in physics. He was the chairman of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Labs from 1962 to 1964. He was also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Optical Society of America.

#1096

David Vanderbilt

#34190

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

David Vanderbilt is a professor of physics at Rutgers University researching condensed-matter physics since 1991, and named Board of Governors Professor of Physics in 2009. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1976 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1981 studying under John D. Joannopoulos. He received the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics in 2006. The Aneesur Rahman prize is the highest honor given by the American Physical Society for work in computational physics. In 2013 he was elected to the National Academy of Science.

#1097

Avshalom Elitzur

Avshalom Elitzur

#23863

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Avshalom Cyrus Elitzur is an Israeli physicist and philosopher. Biography Avshalom Elitzur was born in Kerman, Iran, to a Jewish family. When he was two years old, his family immigrated to Israel and settled in Rehovot. He left school at the age of sixteen and began working as a laboratory technician at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Elitzur received no formal university training before obtaining his PhD.

#1098

Michael Rossmann

#10931

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Michael G. Rossmann was a German-American physicist, microbiologist, and Hanley Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at Purdue University who led a team of researchers to be the first to map the structure of a human common cold virus to an atomic level. He also discovered the Rossmann fold protein motif. His most well recognised contribution to structural biology is the development of a phasing technique named molecular replacement, which has led to about three quarters of depositions in the Protein Data Bank.

#1099

Robert Hartzell Cole

#45096

Overall Influence

#1100

Laura Mersini-Houghton

Laura Mersini-Houghton

#25015

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Laura Mersini-Houghton is an Albanian-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a proponent of the multiverse hypothesis and the author of a theory for the origin of the universe that holds that our universe is one of many selected by quantum gravitational dynamics of matter and energy. She argues that anomalies in the current structure of the universe are best explained as the gravitational tug exerted by other universes.

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