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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,

#1351

James Hamilton

#45794

Overall Influence

1918 - 2000 (82 years)

James "Jim" Hamilton was an Irish mathematician and theoretical physicist who, whilst at Dublin Institute for Advanced Sciences , helped to develop the theory of cosmic-ray mesons with Walter Heitler and Hwan-Wu Peng.

#1352

John Gatenby Bolton

#36375

Overall Influence

1922 - 1993 (71 years)

John Gatenby Bolton was a British-Australian astronomer who was fundamental to the development of radio astronomy. In particular, Bolton was integral in establishing that discrete radio sources were either galaxies or the remnants of supernovae, rather than stars. He also played a significant role in the discovery of quasars and the centre of the Milky Way. Bolton served as the inaugural director of the Parkes radio telescope in Australia and established the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in California. Bolton's students held directorships at most of the radio observatories in the world and one was a Nobel Prize winner.

#1353

Jiří Grygar

#24365

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Jiří Grygar is a Czech astronomer, popularizer of science and Kalinga Prize laureate. Career After studying physics at the Masaryk University in Brno and astronomy at the Charles University in Prague he joined the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, Department of Stellar Astronomy in Ondřejov. Twenty years later he moved to the Institute of Physics, Low Temperature Physics Department at Řež, where he remained for more than ten years. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution he joined the High Energy Physics Department at the same institution. From 1992 to 1998, Grygar chaired the Czech Astronomical Society.

#1354

Eva Crane

#19082

Overall Influence

1912 - 2007 (95 years)

Eva Crane born Ethel Eva Widdowson was a researcher and author on the subjects of bees and beekeeping. Trained as a quantum mathematician, she changed her field of interest to bees, and spent decades researching bees, traveling to more than 60 countries, often in challenging conditions.

#1355

Bruria Kaufman

#11449

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Bruria Kaufman was an American theoretical physicist. She contributed to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, to statistical physics, where she used applied spinor analysis to rederive the result of Lars Onsager on the partition function of the two-dimensional Ising model, and to the study of the Mössbauer effect, on which she collaborated with John von Neumann and Harry Lipkin.

#1356

Michael Coey

#42260

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

John Michael David Coey , known as Michael Coey, is a Belfast-born experimental physicist working in the fields of magnetism and spintronics. He is an Emeritus professor at the Trinity College Dublin .

#1357

Charles Stuart Bowyer

#35138

Overall Influence

1934 - 2020 (86 years)

Charles Stuart Bowyer was an American astronomer and academic. He was a professor at the University of California. Early life and education Bowyer was born in Toledo, Ohio, to Howard and Elizabeth Bowyer. His father was a pilot. As a boy, he attended a one-room grade school near his father’s farm in Orland Park, Ill., before being valedictorian at Orland Park High School. He graduated from Miami University of Ohio with a degree in physics. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Catholic University in 1965.

#1358

David Eisenberg

David Eisenberg

#14586

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

David S. Eisenberg is an American biochemist and biophysicist best known for his contributions to structural biology and computational molecular biology, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles since the early 1970s and director of the UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics & Proteomics since the early 1990s, as well as a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

#1359

Narasimhaiengar Mukunda

#23080

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Narasimhaiengar Mukunda is an Indian theoretical physicist. Mukunda's higher education began at Delhi University, where he was granted a B.Sc. degree in 1953. For his Ph.D. he studied at University of Rochester with E. C. G. Sudarshan and graduated in 1964. Mukunda’s thesis dealt with Hamiltonian mechanics, symmetry groups and elementary particles. He also studied group theory at Princeton University with Valentine Bargmann, including topological groups and Lie theory.

#1360

James Gilbert Baker

James Gilbert Baker

#19560

Overall Influence

1914 - 2005 (91 years)

James Gilbert Baker was an American astronomer and designer of optics systems. Biography He was born in Louisville, Kentucky to Jesse B. Baker and Hattie M. Stallard, the fourth child of that couple. He attended Louisville duPont Manual High School then majored in mathematics at the University of Louisville. During his time at the university, he became interested in astronomy and grinding his own mirrors. In 1931 he helped to form the Louisville Astronomical Society. He graduated with a B.A. in 1935.

#1361

Samuel T. Durrance

Samuel T. Durrance

#27545

Overall Influence

1943 - 2023 (80 years)

Samuel Thornton Durrance was an American scientist who flew aboard two NASA Space Shuttle missions as a payload specialist. Background Durrance was born September 17, 1943, in Tallahassee, Florida, but grew up in Tampa, Florida. He attended Wilson Junior High and graduated from Plant High School in 1961, lettering in American football for three years and playing both defense and offense. He received a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Science degree in physics , at California State University, Los Angeles , 1972 and 1974, respectively, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in astro-geophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 1980.

#1362

Laura A. Lopez

#52514

Overall Influence

Laura A. Lopez is an associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State University studying the life cycle of stars. She was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy in 2016, which is awarded by the American Astronomical Society for outstanding research and promise for future research by a postdoctoral woman researcher.

#1363

J. Richard Fisher

#39305

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

James Richard Fisher is an American astronomer. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1972 from the University of Maryland, College Park and his B.S. in Physics in 1965 from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

#1364

Wilhelmina Iwanowska

#43970

Overall Influence

1905 - 1999 (94 years)

Wilhemina Iwanowska was a Polish astronomer and the first astrophysics professor in Poland. Iwanowska was pioneer of astrophysics in Polish science. Childhood and family Wilhemina Iwanowska was born to a noble family on the borderlands of Poland, however, she did not come from money.

#1365

Bryan Gaensler

#39553

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Bryan Malcolm Gaensler is an Australian astronomer based at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies magnetars, supernova remnants, and magnetic fields. In 2014, he was appointed as Director of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, after James R. Graham's departure. He was the co-chair of the Canadian 2020 Long Range Plan Committee with Pauline Barmby. In 2023, he was appointed as Dean of Physical and Biological Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

#1366

G. Peter Lepage

#41277

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

G. Peter Lepage is a Canadian American theoretical physicist and an academic administrator. He was the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University from 2003 to 2013.

#1367

Fred Cummings

#26105

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Frederick W. Cummings was an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of California, Riverside. He specialised in cavity quantum electrodynamics, many-body theory, non-linear dynamics, and biophysics.

#1368

Charles H. Bennett

#4601

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Charles Henry Bennett is a physicist, information theorist and IBM Fellow at IBM Research. Bennett's recent work at IBM has concentrated on a re-examination of the physical basis of information, applying quantum physics to the problems surrounding information exchange. He has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information, particularly in the realm of quantum computation, but also in cellular automata and reversible computing. He discovered, with Gilles Brassard, the concept of quantum cryptography and is one of the founding fathers of modern quantum i...

#1369

Stuart L. Shapiro

#49096

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Stuart Louis Shapiro is an American theoretical astrophysicist, who works on numerical relativity with applications in astrophysics, specialising in compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes.

#1370

Edward L. G. Bowell

#26181

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Edward L. G. "Ted" Bowell , is an American astronomer. Bowell was educated at Emanuel School London, University College, London, and the University of Paris. He was principal investigator of the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search . He has discovered a large number of asteroids, both as part of LONEOS and in his own right before LONEOS began. Among the latter are the Jovian asteroids 2357 Phereclos, 2759 Idomeneus, 2797 Teucer, 2920 Automedon, 3564 Talthybius, 4057 Demophon, and 1988 AK. He also co-discovered the periodic comet 140P/Bowell-Skiff and the non-periodic comet C/1980 E1.

#1371

Kōsuke Morita

#24141

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Kōsuke Morita is a Japanese experimental nuclear physicist, known as the leader of the Japanese team that discovered nihonium . He currently holds a joint appointment as a professor at Kyushu University’s Graduate School of Science and as director of the Super Heavy Element Research Group at Riken's Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science.

#1372

Donald William Kerst

Donald William Kerst

#36491

Overall Influence

1911 - 1993 (82 years)

Donald William Kerst was an American physicist who worked on advanced particle accelerator concepts and plasma physics. He is most notable for his development of the betatron, a novel type of particle accelerator used to accelerate electrons.

#1373

William Bialek

#23239

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

William Samuel Bialek is a theoretical biophysicist and a professor at Princeton University and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Much of his work, which has ranged over a wide variety of theoretical problems at the interface of physics and biology, centers around whether various functions of living beings are optimal, and whether a precise quantification of their performance approaches limits set by basic physical principles. Best known among these is an influential series of studies applying the principles of information theory to the analysis of the neural encoding of information in the nervous ...

#1374

Nico van Kampen

#29358

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Nicolaas 'Nico' Godfried van Kampen was a Dutch theoretical physicist, who worked mainly on statistical mechanics and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Van Kampen was born in Leiden, and was a nephew of Frits Zernike. He studied physics at Leiden University, where in 1952 under the direction of Hendrik Anthony Kramers he earned his PhD with thesis Contributions to the quantum theory of light scattering. He showed in his thesis how to deal with singularities in quantum mechanical scattering processes, an important step in the development of renormalization, according to Kramers. Van Kampen made fundamental contributions to non-equilibrium processes and in many-body theory .

#1375

Alexander V. Balatsky

Alexander V. Balatsky

#51573

Overall Influence

Alexander V. Balatsky is a USSR-born American physicist. He is the professor of theoretical physics at NORDITA and University of Connecticut. He served as the founding director of the Institute for Materials Science at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2014–2017.

#1376

Anton Kapustin

#16584

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Anton Nikolayevich Kapustin is a Russian-American theoretical physicist and the Earle C. Anthony Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. His interests lie in quantum field theory and string theory, and their applications to particle physics and condensed matter theory. He is the son of the pianist-composer Nikolai Kapustin.

#1377

Jonathan Bagger

#31625

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jonathan Anders Bagger is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in high energy physics and string theory. He is known for the Bagger–Lambert–Gustavsson action. Biography Bagger received his bachelor's degree in 1977 from Dartmouth College. He spent the academic year 1977–1978 at the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar. In 1978 he became a graduate student in physics at Princeton University, where he received his PhD in 1983. His doctoral thesis Matter Couplings in Supergravity Theories was supervised by Edward Witten. Bagger was a postdoc from 1983 to 1986 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

#1378

Tara Shears

#33266

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Tara Georgina Shears is a Professor of Physics at the University of Liverpool. Early life Shears was born in Salisbury in Wiltshire. She remained in Wiltshire, living in Wootton Rivers and attending the co-educational comprehensive school Pewsey Vale School, where she was inspired by her chemistry teacher. The school had no sixth form, and her parents moved to Wedhampton , where she attended the co-educational independent school Dauntsey's School, which offered many state scholarships at the time — many of the pupils were state-funded. At A-level she studied Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Engl...

#1379

Robert Adler

#13494

Overall Influence

1913 - 2007 (94 years)

Robert Adler was an Austrian-American inventor who held numerous patents. He worked for Zenith Electronics, retiring as the company's Vice President and Director of Research. His work included developing early sound-based remote controls for televisions, which were the standard for 25 years until replaced by infrared remotes that could transmit more complex commands.

#1380

Davide Gaiotto

#21382

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Davide Silvano Achille Gaiotto is an Italian mathematical physicist who deals with quantum field theories and string theory. He received the Gribov Medal in 2011 and the New Horizons in Physics Prize in 2013.

#1381

John Joannopoulos

#40796

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

John D. Joannopoulos is an American physicist, focused in condensed matter theory. He is currently the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an Elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences , an Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Physical Society .

#1382

Edward C. Stone

Edward C. Stone

#23358

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Edward Carroll Stone is an American space scientist, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, and former director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory . Biography Stone was born in Knoxville, Iowa. After receiving his undergraduate education at Iowa's Burlington Junior College in Iowa, Stone attended the University of Chicago where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics. Stone's astrophysics career goes back to his first cosmic-ray experiments on Discoverer satellites in 1961. He then joined the staff of Caltech as a research fellow, and became a full facult...

#1383

Eric Becklin

#47568

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Eric E. Becklin is an American astrophysicist. The primary focus of Becklin's research is infrared imaging and spectroscopy, including the search for brown dwarfs, the detection of circumstellar dust rings, the dynamics and composition of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and the nature of luminous infrared galaxies.

#1384

David H. Lyth

#45780

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Professor David Lyth is a researcher in particle cosmology at the University of Lancaster. He has published over 165 papers as well as two books on early universe cosmology and cosmological inflation.

#1385

Wolfhart Zimmermann

#26235

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

Wolfhart Zimmermann was a German theoretical physicist, known for his contribution in quantum field theory. He is one of the developers of the LSZ reduction formula. Biography Zimmermann was born in Freiburg im Breisgau.

#1386

Philip Childs Keenan

#38315

Overall Influence

1908 - 2000 (92 years)

Philip Childs Keenan was an American astronomer. Keenan was an American spectroscopist who collaborated with William Wilson Morgan and Edith Kellman to develop the MKK stellar spectral classification system between 1939 and 1943. This two-dimensional classification system was further revised by Morgan and Keenan in 1973. The MK system remains the standard stellar spectral classification system used by astronomers today.

#1387

Robert W. Fuller

Robert W. Fuller

#8162

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Robert Works Fuller is an American physicist, author, social reformer, and former president of Oberlin College. Biography Robert Fuller attended Oberlin College, leaving without graduating in order to earn his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University in 1961. He taught at Columbia University, where he co-authored the book Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics.

#1388

Sergei Odintsov

#49137

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Sergei D. Odintsov is a Russian astrophysicist active in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory and quantum gravity. Odintsov is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Ciències de l'Espai since 2003. He also collaborates as group leader at research projects of the Tomsk State Pedagogical University. He is editor-in-chief of Symmetry, and is a member of the editorial boards of Gravitation and Cosmology, International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics, International Journal of Modern Physics D, Journal of Gravity, Universe, and the Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin.

#1389

Rainer Blatt

#37595

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Rainer Blatt is a German-Austrian experimental physicist. His research centres on the areas of quantum optics and quantum information. He and his team performed one of the first experiments to teleport atoms, the other was done at NIST in Boulder Colorado. The reports of both groups appeared back-to-back in Nature.

#1390

Anatole Abragam

Anatole Abragam

#10666

Overall Influence

1914 - 2011 (97 years)

Anatole Abragam was a French physicist who wrote The Principles of Nuclear Magnetism and made significant contributions to the field of nuclear magnetic resonance. Originally from Griva, Courland Governorate, Russian Empire, Abragam and his family emigrated to France in 1925.

#1391

Sergey Kapitsa

#14464

Overall Influence

1928 - 2012 (84 years)

Sergey Petrovich Kapitsa was a Russian physicist and demographer. He was best known as host of the popular and long-running Russian scientific TV show, Evident, but Incredible. His father was the Nobel laureate Soviet-era physicist Pyotr Kapitsa, and his brother was the geographer and Antarctic explorer Andrey Kapitsa.

#1392

Hideo Hosono

#29008

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

is a Japanese material scientist most known for the discovery of iron-based superconductors. Career and research Hosono is also a pioneer in developing transparent oxide semiconductors: he proposed a material design concept for a transparent amorphous oxide semiconductor with large electron mobility, demonstrated the excellent performance of TAOS thin film transistors for next generation displays and successfully converted a cement constituent 12CaO·7Al2O3 into transparent semiconductor, metal, and eventually superconductors.

#1393

Lodewijk Woltjer

Lodewijk Woltjer

#25771

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Lodewijk Woltjer was an astronomer, and the son of astronomer Jan Woltjer. He studied at the University of Leiden under Jan Oort earning a PhD in astronomy in 1957 with a thesis on the Crab Nebula. This was followed by post-doctoral research appointments to various American universities and the subsequent appointment of professor of theoretical astrophysics and plasma physics in the University of Leiden. From 1964 to 1974 he was Rutherford Professor of Astronomy and Chair of the Astronomy Department at Columbia University in New York. From 1975 to 1987 he was Director General of the European Southern Observatory , where he initiated the construction of the Very Large Telescope.

#1394

Wayne Rosing

#12759

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Wayne Rosing is an American engineering manager. Rosing was an engineering manager at Digital Equipment Corporation and Data General in the 1970s. He became a director of engineering at Apple Computer in 1980. There he led the Apple Lisa project, the forerunner to the Macintosh. He then went on to work at Sun Microsystems in 1985. After managing hardware development for products such as the SPARCstation, he became manager of Sun Microsystems Laboratories in 1990. From 1992 through 1996 he headed the spin-off First Person, which developed the Java Platform. He was then chief technology offic...

#1395

Samuel Curran

#12448

Overall Influence

1912 - 1998 (86 years)

Sir Samuel Crowe Curran , FRS, FRSE, was a physicist and the first Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde – the first of the new technical universities in Britain. He is the inventor of the scintillation counter, the proportional counter, and the proximity fuze.

#1396

Eric Mazur

#14267

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Eric Mazur is a physicist and educator at Harvard University, and an entrepreneur in technology start-ups for the educational and technology markets. Mazur's research is in experimental ultrafast optics, condensed matter physics and peer instruction. Born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Leiden University.

#1397

John F. Hawley

#40770

Overall Influence

1958 - 2021 (63 years)

John Frederick Hawley was an American astrophysicist and a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia. In 2013, he shared the Shaw Prize for Astronomy with Steven Balbus. Early life John Hawley was born in 1958 in Annapolis, Maryland. He was the younger brother of former astronaut Steven A. Hawley. The family moved to Salina, Kansas when he was young. He graduated from Salina Central High School in 1976.

#1398

Ivan A. Getting

#13164

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Ivan Alexander Getting was an American physicist and electrical engineer, credited with the development of the Global Positioning System . He was the co-leader of the research group which developed the SCR-584, an automatic microwave tracking fire-control system, which enabled M9 Gun Director directed anti-aircraft guns to destroy a significant percentage of the German V-1 flying bombs launched against London late in the Second World War.

#1399

Gerald Gabrielse

#39920

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Gerald Gabrielse is an American physicist. He is the Board of Trustees Professor of Physics and director of the Center for Fundamental Physics at Northwestern University, and Emeritus George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He is primarily known for his experiments trapping and investigating antimatter, measuring the electron g-factor, and measuring the electron electric dipole moment. He has been described as "a leader in super-precise measurements of fundamental particles and the study of anti-matter."

#1400

A. P. Balachandran

A. P. Balachandran

#20630

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Aiyalam Parameswaran Balachandran is an Indian theoretical physicist known for his extensive contributions to the role of classical topology in quantum physics. He is currently an emeritus professor in the Department of Physics, Syracuse University, where he was previously the Joel Dorman Steele Professor of Physics between 1999 and 2012. He has also been a fellow of the American Physical Society since 1988 and was awarded a prize by the U.S. Chapter of the Indian Physics Association in recognition of his outstanding scientific contributions.

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