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.

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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#1301

Akira Tonomura

#28033

Overall Influence

1942 - 2012 (70 years)

was a Japanese physicist, best known for his development of electron holography and his experimental verification of the Aharonov–Bohm effect. Biography Tonomura was born in Hyōgo, Japan, and graduated from the University of Tokyo with a degree in physics. Upon graduation he joined the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, where he later attained the title "Fellow" in 1999.

#1302

Nigel Goldenfeld

#12422

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Nigel David Goldenfeld is a Swanlund Chair, Professor of Physics Department in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology, and the leader of the Biocomplexity group at Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Goldenfeld is a co-founder of Numerix and the author of the 1993 textbook "Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group," a widely used graduate textbook in statistical physics.

#1303

Kam-Biu Luk

#49992

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Kam-Biu Luk is a professor of physics, with a focus on particle physics, at UC Berkeley and a senior faculty scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's physics division. Luk has conducted research on neutrino oscillation and CP violation. Luk and his collaborator Yifang Wang were awarded the 2014 Panofsky Prize “for their leadership of the Daya Bay experiment, which produced the first definitive measurement of θ13 angle of the neutrino mixing matrix.” His work on neutrino oscillation also received 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics shared with other teams. He also re...

#1304

B. V. Sreekantan

#19311

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Badanaval Venkatasubba Sreekantan was an Indian high-energy astrophysicist and a former associate of Homi J. Bhabha at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research . He was also a Dr. S. Radhakrishnan Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.

#1305

Elizabeth Roemer

Elizabeth Roemer

#32406

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Elizabeth "Pat" Roemer was an American astronomer and educator who specialized in astronomy with a particular focus on comets and minor planets. She was well-known for the recovery of lost comets, as well as for her discovery of two asteroids, the co-discovery of Jupiter's moon Themisto, and for the asteroid 1657 Roemera that was named in her honor.

#1306

Claes-Göran Granqvist

Claes-Göran Granqvist

#27466

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Claes-Göran Sture Granqvist is a materials physicist and Professor of Solid State Physics at Uppsala University in Sweden. Granqvist is considered a pioneer and expert in photochromic materials and energy-efficient building materials such as glass, paint, and wood.

#1307

Immanuel Bloch

#22305

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Immanuel Bloch is a German experimental physicist. His research is focused on the investigation of quantum many-body systems using ultracold atomic and molecular quantum gases. Bloch is known for his work on atoms in artificial crystals of light, optical lattices, especially the first realization of a quantum phase transition from a weakly interacting superfluid to a strongly interacting Mott insulating state of matter.

#1308

Matthias Steinmetz

#40778

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Matthias Steinmetz is a German astronomer and astrophysicist. He is director of the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam and professor at the University of Potsdam. Steinmetz is a specialist in the areas of cosmology, the formation and evolution of galaxies and computational astrophysics. Steinmetz has a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from the Saarland University and a M.S. in Physics from the Technical University of Munich . He received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1993 at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. For his thesis "On the formation and evolution of galaxies" he was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society.

#1309

Alain Rouet

#28133

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Alain Rouet is a French theoretical physicist, entrepreneur, poet, and novelist. Education and career At the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, Rouet graduated in 1969 with an engineering degree and in 1974 with a doctorate in theoretical physics. He worked as a postdoc for the academic year 1975–1976 at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich and from 1976 to 1978 at CERN. From 1979 to 1981 he was a scientist at the CNRS at the CPT in Marseille-Luminy. At the same time, he acted in an advisory capacity for Aérospatiale and the French Atomic Energy Commission. From 1981 to 1982 he was Einstein Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.

#1310

John Riley Holt

#41282

Overall Influence

1918 - 2009 (91 years)

John Riley Holt, FRS was an English experimental physicist who played a part in the development of the atom bomb and later became one of the pioneers of elementary particle physics research. Early life and education Holt was born in Runcorn, Cheshire, England, in 1918, his father being a worker in a boat-building yard, and his mother the owner of a bakery and confectionery shop. He was educated in Runcorn and in 1934 at the age of 16 became an undergraduate in the physics department at the University of Liverpool. The following year James Chadwick was appointed Professor of Physics at the u...

#1311

Franco Pacini

#30107

Overall Influence

1939 - 2012 (73 years)

Franco Pacini was an Italian astrophysicist and professor at the University of Florence. He carried out research, mostly in High Energy Astrophysics, in Italy, France, United States and at the European Southern Observatory.

#1312

George Robert Carruthers

George Robert Carruthers

#23791

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

George Robert Carruthers was an African American inventor, physicist, engineer and space scientist. Carruthers perfected a compact and very powerful ultraviolet camera/spectrograph for NASA to use when it launched Apollo 16 in 1972. He designed it so astronauts could use it on the lunar surface, making all adjustments inside their bulky space suits. Upon instructions from Carruthers, they used the camera to record the Earth's outermost atmosphere, noting its variations, and also mapped portions of the far-ultraviolet sky recording stars and galaxies, and the gaseous media between them. In 197...

#1313

Frank J. Sciulli

#33952

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Frank J. Sciulli is an American experimental physicist, specializing in particle physics. Sciulli studied at the University of Pennsylvania with bachelor's degree in 1960, master's degree in 1961, and PhD in 1965 with a dissertation involving experiments on K-meson decays. At Caltech he was a postdoc. There he became in 1969 an assistant professor and later a professor. In 1981 he became a professor at Columbia University. There he chaired the physics department from 1988 to 1991.

#1314

R. S. Krishnan

#26198

Overall Influence

1911 - 1999 (88 years)

Rappal Sangameswaran Krishnan was an Indian experimental physicist and scientist. He was the Head of the department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science and the vice chancellor of the University of Kerala. He is known for his pioneering researches on colloid optics and a discovery which is now known as Krishnan Effect. He was a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the Institute of Physics, London and a recipient of the C. V. Raman Prize. 25 students were guided by RSKrishnan for Ph D. Dr T N Vasudevan was the 25th. Prof Vasudevan retired from ...

#1315

Rodney Baxter

#24573

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Rodney James Baxter FRS FAA is an Australian physicist, specialising in statistical mechanics. He is well known for his work in exactly solved models, in particular vertex models such as the six-vertex model and eight-vertex model, and the chiral Potts model and hard hexagon model. A recurring theme in the solution of such models, the Yang–Baxter equation, also known as the "star–triangle relation", is named in his honour.

#1316

Michael E. Phelps

#12735

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Michael Edward Phelps is a professor and an American biophysicist. He is known for being one of the fathers of positron emission tomography . Biography Phelps was born in 1939 in Cleveland, Ohio. He spent his early life as a boxer. However, at age 19, he was severely injured in a car crash, leaving him in a coma for several days and effectively ending his boxing career. Phelps went on to earn his B.S. in chemistry and mathematics from Western Washington University in 1965, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis, in 1970. He joined the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine in 1970.

#1317

Olin Chaddock Wilson

#46491

Overall Influence

1909 - 1994 (85 years)

Olin Chaddock Wilson was an American astronomer best known for his work as a stellar spectroscopist. Born in San Francisco, California as the son of a lawyer, Wilson showed an interest in physics at an early age. He studied astronomy and physics at the University of California, Berkeley and wrote his first scientific paper in 1932 on the subject of the speed of light. He received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1934.

#1318

Harold Furth

#26159

Overall Influence

1930 - 2002 (72 years)

Harold Paul Furth was an Austrian-American physicist who was a pioneer in leading the American efforts to harness thermonuclear fusion for the generation of electricity. He died of a heart ailment on 21 February 2002.

#1319

Bruce Allen

#35965

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Bruce Allen is an American physicist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover Germany and leader of the Einstein@Home project for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. He is also a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the initiator / project leader of smartmontools hard disk utility.

#1320

Jonathan Lunine

#18579

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jonathan I. Lunine is an American planetary scientist and physicist. Lunine teaches at Cornell University, where he is the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and chair of the Department of Astronomy. Having published more than 380 research papers, Lunine is at the forefront of research into planet formation, evolution, and habitability. His work includes analysis of brown dwarfs, gas giants, and planetary satellites. Within the Solar System, bodies with potential organic chemistry and prebiotic conditions, particularly Saturn's moon Titan, have been the focus of Lunine's resea...

#1321

H. Pierre Noyes

#23721

Overall Influence

1923 - 2016 (93 years)

H. Pierre Noyes was an American theoretical physicist. He became a member of the faculty at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University in 1962. Noyes specialized in several areas of research, including the relativistic few-body problem in nuclear and particle physics.

#1322

Norman Packard

#7777

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Norman Harry Packard is a chaos theory physicist and one of the founders of the Prediction Company and ProtoLife. He is an alumnus of Reed College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Packard is known for his contributions to chaos theory, complex systems, and artificial life. He coined the phrase "the edge of chaos".

#1323

Amer Iqbal

#11772

Overall Influence

Amer Iqbal is a Pakistanii American theoretical physicist. He is primarily known for his work in string theory and mathematical physics. Biography Amer Iqbal has a Doctorate in Theoretical physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He carried out his doctoral research under the supervision of Barton Zwiebach. He has held a faculty position at University of Washington and postdoctoral positions at the University of Texas at Austin and at Harvard University. He also worked as an associate professor of physics at Lahore University of Management Sciences and Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences.

#1324

Harold J. Morowitz

#7459

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Harold Joseph Morowitz was an American biophysicist who studied the application of thermodynamics to living systems. Author of numerous books and articles, his work includes technical monographs as well as essays. The origin of life was his primary research interest for more than fifty years. He was the Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy at George Mason University after a long career at Yale.

#1325

Eugène Cremmer

#24095

Overall Influence

1942 - 2019 (77 years)

Eugène Cremmer was a French theoretical physicist. He was directeur de recherche at the CNRS working at the École Normale Supérieure. Cremmer was a postdoc at CERN from 1971–72. In 1978, together with Bernard Julia and Joël Scherk, he co-developed 11 dimensional supergravity theory and proposed a mechanism of spontaneous compactification in field theory.

#1326

Clifford V. Johnson

#29587

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Clifford Victor Johnson is a British theoretical physicist and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara department of Physics. Biography Johnson was born in London, England, and lived in Montserrat for 10 years. From an early age, Johnson was interested in electronics. He would spend time reading on the subject, and designing small machinery such as radios. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Imperial College London in 1989 and he completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Southampton in 1992.

#1327

Valentin Gapontsev

Valentin Gapontsev

#8648

Overall Influence

1939 - 2021 (82 years)

Valentin P. Gapontsev was a Russian-American laser physicist, billionaire, and the founder, CEO, and chairman of IPG Photonics. At the time of his death, his net worth was estimated at US$2.3 billion.

#1328

Ted Jacobson

#30835

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Theodore A. "Ted" Jacobson is an American theoretical physicist. He is known for his work on the connection between gravity and thermodynamics. In particular, in 1995 Jacobson proved that the Einstein field equations describing relativistic gravity can be derived from thermodynamic considerations.

#1329

Alan Martin

#43766

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Alan Douglas Martin FRS is a British physicist, currently Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Durham. Education Martin was educated at the Eltham College. He received his BSc and PhD degrees from the University College London.

#1330

Nancy Roman

#12681

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

Nancy Grace Roman was an American astronomer who made important contributions to stellar classification and motions. The first female executive at NASA, Roman served as NASA's first Chief of Astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, establishing her as one of the "visionary founders of the US civilian space program".

#1331

David E. Pritchard

#34406

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David Edward Pritchard is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , working on atomic physics and educational research. Career Early work Pritchard completed his PhD in 1968 in Harvard University under the supervision of Daniel Kleppner. For his thesis he built the first atomic scattering machine with polarized atoms to study differential spin exchange scattering - the process that excites the 21 cm hydrogen radiation.

#1332

James Edward Young

#35624

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

James Edward Young is an American physicist who was the first black tenured faculty member in the Department of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a founding member of the National Society of Black Physicists and a mentor for Shirley Ann Jackson.

#1333

Achim Richter

#49690

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Achim Richter is a German nuclear physicist. He became a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Darmstadt University of Technology in 1974 and retired in September 2008. From 1 November 2008 to 31 October 2012 he was director of the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas in Trento, Italy. Since 1 November 2012, he has been professor again at the Institute for Nuclear Physics of TU Darmstadt.

#1334

Arthur H. Rosenfeld

Arthur H. Rosenfeld

#24395

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Arthur Hinton Rosenfeld was a University of California, Berkeley physicist and California energy commissioner, dubbed the "Godfather of Energy Efficiency", for developing new standards which helped improve energy efficiency in California and subsequently worldwide.

#1335

Bruce C. Murray

Bruce C. Murray

#16394

Overall Influence

1931 - 2013 (82 years)

Bruce Churchill Murray was an American planetary scientist. He was a director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-founder of The Planetary Society. Education and early life Murray received his Ph.D. in geology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and joined Standard Oil of California as a geologist. He served in the United States Air Force as a geophysicist, and the U.S. Civil Service before joining California Institute of Technology in 1960.

#1336

Sally Dawson

#44221

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Sally Dawson is an American physicist who deals with theoretical elementary particle physics. Education and career Dawson studied mathematics and physics at Duke University with a bachelor's degree in 1977 and at Harvard University with a master's degree in 1978 and a doctorate in 1981 with thesis advisor Howard Georgi and thesis Radiative Corrections to sin2θW. She was a postdoc at Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . From 1986 she was at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she became a senior scientist in 1994 and a group leader in 1998. From 2001 to the present, she is an adjunct professor at the C.

#1337

Patrick A. Lee

#36458

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Patrick A. Lee is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . After spending ten years with the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories, Lee joined MIT in 1982. He has contributed to the field of "mesoscopic physics," or the study of small devices at low temperatures. He has also made important contributions to the theory of disordered electronic systems, among them the concept of universal conductance fluctuations. He was awarded the 2005 Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics as well as the Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society.

#1338

Klaus Hepp

#15624

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Klaus Hepp is a German-born Swiss theoretical physicist working mainly in quantum field theory. Hepp studied mathematics and physics at Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität in Münster and at the Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule in Zurich, where, in 1962, with Res Jost as thesis first advisor and Markus Fierz as thesis second advisor, he received a doctorate for the thesis and at ETH in 1963 attained the rank of Privatdozent. From 1966 until his retirement in 2002 he was professor of theoretical physics there. From 1964 to 1966 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He...

#1339

Andrew Fraknoi

#14708

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Andrew Fraknoi is a retired professor of astronomy recognized for his lifetime of work using everyday language to make astronomy more accessible and popular for both students and the general public. In 2017 Fraknoi retired from his position as Chair of the Department of Astronomy at Foothill College. In retirement he continues to teach through the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University, to give public lectures, and to add to his body of written work. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors in his field.

#1340

Bruno Coppi

#36493

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Bruno Coppi is an Italian-American physicist specializing in plasma physics. In 1959, Coppi attained an Italian doctoral degree at Polytechnic University of Milan and was subsequently a docent and research scientist at the Polytechnic Institute and the University of Milan. In 1961, he was a scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. From 1964 to 1967, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, from 1967 to 1969 at the Institute for Advanced Study, and from 1968 professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the 1980s, Coppi was a member o...

#1341

Allan H. MacDonald

#33983

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Allan H. MacDonald is a theoretical condensed matter physicist and the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair Professor of Physics at The University of Texas at Austin. He was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, and attended local schools completing a B.S. at St. Francis Xavier University in 1973. He completed his Ph.D.in physics at The University of Toronto in 1978, working with S.H. Vosko on relativistic generalizations of density functional theory, and on the application of density functional theory to magnetism in metals.

#1342

Blas Cabrera Navarro

#36307

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Blas Cabrera Navarro is a Stanley G. Wojcicki Professor of Physics at Stanford University best known for his experiment in search of magnetic monopoles. He is the son of Spanish physicist Nicolás Cabrera and the grandson of Blas Cabrera Felipe, also a Spanish physicist.

#1343

Jay Pasachoff

#13500

Overall Influence

1943 - 2022 (79 years)

Jay Myron Pasachoff was an American astronomer. Pasachoff was Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College and the author of textbooks and tradebooks in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and other sciences.

#1344

Francis F. Chen

#32324

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Francis F. Chen is a Chinese-born American plasma physicist. Early life and education On November 18, 1929, Chen was born in Guangdong province, China. Chen studied at Harvard University, where he received his bachelor's degree in astronomy in 1950, a master's degree in physics in 1953, and his doctorate in 1954. At that time he worked on high-energy physics .

#1345

Oscar W. Greenberg

#27453

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Oscar Wallace Greenberg is an American physicist and professor at University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. In 1964, he posited the existence of quarks that obeyed parastatistics as the fundamental constituents of hadronic particles. ,

#1346

Richard Q. Twiss

#38441

Overall Influence

1920 - 2005 (85 years)

Richard Quintin Twiss was a British astronomer. He is known for his work on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect with Robert Hanbury Brown. It led to the development of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss intensity interferometer in the UK in 1954. Their work appeared to contradict the established beliefs about quantum interference, and he and Brown received the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for it in 1968.

#1347

Stanford E. Woosley

#44511

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Stanford Earl Woosley is a physicist, and Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is the director of the Center for Supernova Research at University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published over 300 papers.

#1348

Stephen Gull

#25183

Overall Influence

Stephen Gull is a British physicist based at St John's College, Cambridge credited, together with Anthony N. Lasenby, Joan Lasenby and Chris J. L. Doran, with raising the interest of the physics community to the mathematical language and methods of geometric algebra and geometric calculus. These have been rediscovered and refined by David Hestenes, who built on the fundamental work of William Kingdon Clifford and Hermann Grassmann. In 1998, together with Lasenby and Doran, he proposed gauge theory gravity.

#1349

Austen Angell

#39550

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Charles Austen Angell was a renowned Australian and American physical chemist known for his prolific and highly cited research on the chemistry and physics of glasses and glass-forming liquids. He was internationally recognized as a luminary in the fields of glasses, liquids, water and ionic liquids.

#1350

Anil Bhardwaj

#30837

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Anil Bhardwaj is an Indian astrophysicist. He is the director of the Physical Research Laboratory, which is a unit of the Department of Space of Government of India in Ahmedabad, India. Early life Bhardwaj graduated in maths, statistics and physics with honours. He earned his Master of Science degree in physics from Lucknow University. He received his Doctorate in applied physics in 1992 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi.

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