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,

#1401

Steven R. White

#32550

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Steven R. White is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a condensed matter physicist who specializes in the simulation of quantum systems. He graduated from the University of California, San Diego; he then received his Ph.D. at Cornell University, where he was a shared student with Kenneth Wilson and John Wilkins.

#1402

James Gunn

#32339

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

James Edward Gunn is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Princeton University. Gunn's early theoretical work in astronomy has helped establish the current understanding of how galaxies form, and the properties of the space between galaxies. He also suggested important observational tests to confirm the presence of dark matter in galaxies, and predicted the existence of a Gunn–Peterson trough in the spectra of distant quasars.

#1403

Daan Frenkel

#27519

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Daan Frenkel is a Dutch computational physicist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. Education Frenkel completed his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 1977 in experimental physical chemistry.

#1404

Alan Harold Luther

#47510

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Alan Harold Luther is an American physicist, specializing in condensed matter physics. Education and career Luther graduated in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in 1962 and an M.S. in 1963. In 1967 he graduated from the University of Maryland with a Ph.D. in physics under the supervision of Richard Allan Ferrell. As a postdoc Luther was from 1967 to 1969 at the Technical University of Munich and from 1969 to 1971 at Brookhaven National Laboratory. At Harvard University he was from 1971 to 1973 an assistant professor and from 1973 to 1976 an associate professor.

#1405

Hans Schlegel

#19415

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Hans Wilhelm Schlegel is a German physicist, a former ESA astronaut, and a veteran of two NASA Space Shuttle missions. Early life and education Schlegel, born and raised in Germany, graduated as an international exchange student from Lewis Central High School in Council Bluffs, Iowa and Hansa Gymnasium in Cologne before studying physics at RWTH Aachen University in his home country. After having received his university degree, he conducted research in semiconductor physics before being trained as an astronaut in the late 1980s by the German Aerospace Center . He flew as a DLR payload speciali...

#1406

M Innas Ali

#41885

Overall Influence

1916 - 2010 (94 years)

M Innas Ali was a Bangladeshi physicist. He was the founding chairman of Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission. He was selected National Professor of Bangladesh in 1994. Education Ali completed his M.Sc. in Physics from University of Dhaka in 1940. Later he earned M.E.E. from New York University and Ph.D. in nuclear physics from London University in 1948 and 1955 respectively.

#1407

Valentin Danilov

#13230

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Valentin Danilov is a Russian physicist, whose research deals with the effect of solar activity on space satellites. In November 2004, he was found guilty and sentenced to 14 years for treason. Many scientists and human rights organizations, both in Russia and worldwide protested the sentence because the information he passed to China was, in fact, declassified in 1992.

#1408

Vladimir Belinski

Vladimir Belinski

#45650

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Vladimir Alekseevich Belinski is a Russian and Italian theoretical physicist involved in research in cosmology and general relativity. He worked at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics from 1968 to 1989 and got his Habilitation degree at this Institute in 1980. As of 2016, he holds the permanent professor position at International Network of the Centers for Relativistic Astrophysics , Italy.

#1409

Luis de la Peña

Luis de la Peña

#27293

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Luis Fernando de la Peña-Auerbach known as Luis de la Peña is a Mexican physicist, born in Mexico City in 1931. He is a researcher of the Institute of Physics and professor of the Faculty of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and is a member of the Science Advisory Council of the Presidency of Mexico.

#1410

Heidi Jo Newberg

Heidi Jo Newberg

#33252

Overall Influence

Heidi Jo Newberg is an American astrophysicist known for her work in understanding the structure of our Milky Way galaxy. Among her team's findings are that the Milky Way is cannibalizing stars from smaller galaxies and that the Milky Way is larger and has more ripples than was previously understood. She is a founding participant in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration , and is a leader of the astrophysical MilkyWay@home volunteer computing project team. She is a professor in the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy...

#1411

Vlatko Vedral

#23200

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Vlatko Vedral is a Serbian-born physicist and Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Until the summer of 2022 he also held a joint appointment at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. He is known for his research on the theory of quantum entanglement and quantum information theory. He has published numerous research papers, which are regularly cited, in quantum mechanics and quantum information, and was awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007. He has held a le...

#1412

Peter L. Hagelstein

#19352

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Peter L. Hagelstein is an associate professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , affiliated with the Research Laboratory of Electronics . Hagelstein received a B.S. and M.S. in 1976 and Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1981, from MIT.

#1413

Malvin Ruderman

#42038

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Malvin Avram Ruderman is an American physicist and astrophysicist. Education Mal Ruderman received his A.B. degree from Columbia University in 1945. His MS degree and PhD are from the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Robert Jay Finkelstein.

#1414

Evelyn Fox Keller

#3623

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Evelyn Fox Keller was an American physicist, author, and feminist. She was Professor Emerita of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller's early work concentrated at the intersection of physics and biology. Her subsequent research focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.

#1415

Gerard J. Milburn

Gerard J. Milburn

#15882

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Gerard James Milburn is an Australian theoretical quantum physicist notable for his work on quantum feedback control, quantum measurements, quantum information, open quantum systems, and Linear optical quantum computing .

#1416

Tihiro Ohkawa

#43226

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Tihiro Ohkawa was a Japanese physicist whose field of work was in plasma physics and fusion power. He was a pioneer in developing ways to generate electricity by nuclear fusion when he worked at General Atomics. Ohkawa died September 27, 2014, in La Jolla, California, at the age of 86.

#1417

Lawrence Sulak

#42344

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Lawrence Sulak is an American physicist, currently the David M. Myers Distinguished Professor at Boston University. Some of Sulak's research has included Higgs detection at the Compact Muon Solenoid in the Large Hadron Collider, neutrino physics, astrophysics, and contributing work for the Monopole, Astrophysics and Cosmic Ray Observatory.

#1418

Terrell L. Hill

#55157

Overall Influence

#1419

Zachary Dutton

#24921

Overall Influence

Zachary John Dutton is an American physicist who has worked on research centred mainly around cold atomic gases, EIT, low light level nonlinear optics, quantum memories, and coherent optical. Dutton graduated from Lindsay High School in Lindsay CA, and was awarded a BSc in physics from UC Berkeley in 1996. He was awarded his PhD in theoretical physics at Harvard University in 2000. His doctoral advisor was Prof.Lene Hau for his thesis entitled "Ultra-slow, stopped, and compressed light in Bose–Einstein condensates" He worked on a number of papers with Hau and Cyrus Behroozi, being amongst the first group to stop light completely.

#1420

Carlos E.M. Wagner

#38574

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Carlos Wagner is a particle physicist. He specializes in theoretical physics, elementary particles and supersymmetric theories. He currently works for the High Energy Physics division of the Argonne National Laboratory and is also a professor at the Physics Department of the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago. He also functions as the Head of the ANL High Energy Physics Theory Group.

#1421

Amy Mainzer

#48597

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Amy Mainzer is an American astronomer, specializing in astrophysical instrumentation and infrared astronomy. She is the deputy project scientist for the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the principal investigator for the NEOWISE project to study minor planets and the Near Earth Object Surveyor space telescope mission.

#1422

Rodolfo Gambini

Rodolfo Gambini

#19222

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Rodolfo Gambini is a physicist and professor of the Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay and a visiting professor at the Horace Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Louisiana State University.

#1423

Vernon Barger

#48258

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Vernon Duane Barger is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particle physics. Education and career Barger graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1960 with a B.S. in engineering science and in 1963 with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. His doctoral advisor was Emil Kazes. In the physics department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison , Barger became in 1963 a research associate, in 1965 an assistant professor, in 1968 full professor, and in 1983 the J. H. Van Vleck Professor of Physics. At UW–Madison he held a Hillsdale Professorship from 1987 to 1991 and sin...

#1424

Herbert Walther

#40632

Overall Influence

1935 - 2006 (71 years)

Herbert Walther was a leader in the fields of quantum optics and laser physics. He was a founding director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. He also was Chair of Physics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is primarily known for his experimental work on cavity quantum electrodynamics as well his groundbreaking work on the ion trap.

#1425

Atsuto Suzuki

#41200

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Atsuto Suzuki is an experimental particle physicist known for his observations of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. Career Suzuki earned his doctorate from Tohoku University in 1974, supervised by Masatoshi Koshiba. In 1982 he was appointed to the faculty of the Tōkyō University. In 1993, he took concurrent positions as professor at the High Energy Physics Laboratory of Tohoku University and professor at the Institute of Cosmic Ray Research of Tōkyō University. Having taken part in the Kamiokande-II and Super-Kamiokande neutrino detection experiments, Suzuki was appointed Director of the Research Center for Neutrino Science in 1998 and led the KamLAND neutrino detection experiments.

#1426

David Charbonneau

David Charbonneau

#37450

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

David Brian Charbonneau is a professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. His research focuses on the development of novel techniques for the detection and characterization of exoplanets orbiting nearby, Sun-like stars.

#1427

Peter Grassberger

#36492

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Peter Grassberger is a retired professor who worked in statistical and particle physics. He made contributions to chaos theory, where he introduced the idea of correlation dimension, a means of measuring a type of fractal dimension of the strange attractor.

#1428

Christophe Galfard

#39187

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Christophe Galfard is a French physicist and writer. Biography After graduating from the École Centrale Paris in 1999 and specializing in theoretical physics, he then obtained a PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Stephen Hawking. He co-published with the latter and Lucy Hawking George and the Secrets of the Universe in 2007.

#1429

Paul S. Wesson

#33548

Overall Influence

1949 - 2015 (66 years)

Paul S. Wesson, B.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.A.S was a professor of astrophysics and theoretical physics. Education and career He was educated at the Universities of London and Cambridge in England, and spent most of his career at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He also spent sabbatical leaves at Berkeley and Stanford in California, and was associated in his later years with the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, Canada. He supervised numerous graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and served as Science Director of the California Institute for Physics and Astronomy.

#1430

Simon Saunders

#20764

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Simon Wolfe Saunders is a British philosopher of physics. He is noted for his work on quantum mechanics , on identity and indiscernibility in physics, and on structural realism. Saunders is currently Professor of Philosophy of Physics at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Merton College, having moved to Oxford in 1996. He has previously held untenured posts at Harvard University , and temporary or visiting positions at Wolfson College, Oxford , the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , Harvard , École Polytechnique , University of British Columbia , Perimeter Institute , and IMéRA . He is ma...

#1431

N. V. Madhusudana

#43930

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Nelamangala Vedavyasachar Madhusudana is an Indian physicist and an emeritus scientist at Raman Research Institute. Known for his research on liquid crystals, Madhusudhana is an elected fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Science Academy. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to physical sciences in 1989.

#1432

Alessandra Buonanno

Alessandra Buonanno

#24613

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Alessandra Buonanno is an Italian naturalized-American theoretical physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam. She is the head of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" department. She holds a research professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park, and honorary professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. She is a leading member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which observed gravitational waves from a binary black-hole merger in 2015.

#1433

Frank John Kerr

#44129

Overall Influence

1918 - 2000 (82 years)

Frank John Kerr was an Australian astronomer and physicist who made contributions to human understanding of the galactic structure of the Milky Way. Born in St Albans to Australian parents, Kerr returned with his family to Australia after the completion of World War I. He received degrees in physics at the University of Melbourne and an MA in astronomy from Harvard University .

#1434

Larry W. Esposito

#45206

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Larry W. Esposito is an American planetary astronomer and a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado Boulder. A 1973 graduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Esposito received his Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1985, he was awarded the H. C. Urey Prize by the American Astronomical Society. He was also awarded The NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and the Richtmeyer Lecture Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Physical Society. His current work invo...

#1435

Hu Ning

#41689

Overall Influence

1916 - 1997 (81 years)

Hu Ning was a Chinese physicist and writer. Biography Hu was born in Suqian, Jiangsu, China on 11 February 1916. From 1928 to 1934, Hu studied at the Zhenjiang High School in Zhenjiang, and Suzhou High School in Suzhou. In 1935, Hu studied at the physical department of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. From 1935 to 1937, Hu studied in the department of physics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he graduated in 1938.

#1436

Yaron Oz

#46830

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Yaron Oz is full Professor of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University. Biography Oz completed summa cum laude his two B.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering and physics in 1987, his M.Sc. degree in 1989, and his Ph.D. degree in 1991 in physics at the Technion. He served as a research officer at the IDF in the years 1990-1995. After post-doctoral studies at University of California in Berkeley during 1996 - 1998, he joined CERN in Switzerland as staff member.

#1437

Sergey Krasnikov

#23671

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Serguei Vladilenovich Krasnikov is a Russian physicist. Life Krasnikov obtained a doctorate in physics and mathematics from Saint Petersburg University. He is currently based at Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia.

#1438

Jan Myrheim

#25596

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jan Myrheim is a Norwegian physicist. He was born in Røyrvik. He took the cand.real. at the University of Oslo in 1972 and took the dr.philos. degree at the University of Trondheim in 1994. He was then appointed as a professor of theoretical physics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He had then worked at the Norwegian Institute of Technology since 1985, except the years 1987 to 1990.

#1439

Robert Kraichnan

#21080

Overall Influence

1928 - 2008 (80 years)

Robert Harry Kraichnan , a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was an American theoretical physicist best known for his work on the theory of fluid turbulence. Life Kraichnan received his B.S. and Ph.D. in physics from MIT, graduating in 1949. He became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1949/50, and was one of the last assistants to Albert Einstein.

#1440

Pavel Kroupa

#49054

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Pavel Kroupa is a Czech-Australian astrophysicist and professor at the University of Bonn. Biography and career After the 1968 failure of Prague spring, Kroupa's family fled from Czechoslovakia leaving all possessions behind; as a consequence Kroupa grew up in Germany and South Africa. He acquired in 1983 his Abitur final exams in Göttingen and afterwards studied physics at The University of Western Australia in Perth. In 1988 he won the Isaac Newton scholarship at the University of Cambridge and in 1992 the senior Rouse Ball research scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge and attained a d...

#1441

Julianne Dalcanton

Julianne Dalcanton

#33491

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Julianne Dalcanton is an American astronomer, professor of astronomy, researcher and comet discoverer. Since September 2021 she is the director of the Simons Foundation Center for Computational Astrophysics.

#1442

David E. Aspnes

#31050

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

David Erik Aspnes is an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences . Aspnes developed fundamental theories of the linear and nonlinear optical properties of materials and thin films, and the technology of spectroscopic ellipsometry . SE is a metrology that is indispensable in the manufacture of integrated circuits.

#1443

Nikodem Popławski

Nikodem Popławski

#24755

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Nikodem Janusz Popławski is a Polish theoretical physicist, most widely noted for the hypothesis that every black hole could be a doorway to another universe and that the universe was formed within a black hole which itself exists in a larger universe. This hypothesis was listed by National Geographic and Science magazines among their top ten discoveries of 2010.

#1444

Daniel Gottesman

#23437

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Daniel Gottesman is a physicist, known for his work regarding quantum error correction, in particular the invention of the stabilizer formalism for quantum error-correcting codes, and the Gottesman–Knill theorem. He is a faculty member at the University of Maryland.

#1445

Clemens C. J. Roothaan

#10780

Overall Influence

1918 - 2019 (101 years)

Clemens C. J. Roothaan was a Dutch physicist and chemist known for his development of the self-consistent field theory of molecular structure. Biography Roothaan was born in Nijmegen. He enrolled TU Delft in 1935 to study electrical engineering. During World War II he was first detained in a prisoner of war camp. Later he and his brother were sent to the Vught concentration camp for involvement with the Dutch Resistance. On September 5, 1944, the remaining prisoners of the camp were moved to the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany ahead of the advancing Allies. Near the end of the war, the Sachsen...

#1446

John Carlstrom

#23304

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

John E. Carlstrom is an American astrophysicist, and Professor, Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Physics, at the University of Chicago. He graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in 1981, and from the University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in 1988.

#1447

Christopher Llewellyn Smith

Christopher Llewellyn Smith

#23232

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sir Christopher Hubert Llewellyn Smith is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Education Llewellyn Smith was educated at the University of Oxford and completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in theoretical physics at New College, Oxford in 1967.

#1448

Cms Tracker Collaboration

#55823

Overall Influence

#1449

Antoine Georges

#28896

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Antoine Georges is a French physicist. He is a professor at the Collège de France in Paris and the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute, New York. In 2023, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

#1450

Bernard F. Burke

#48623

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Bernard Flood Burke was an American astronomer. He co-discovered radio emission from Jupiter, and was part of the team that discovered the first Einstein ring in 1988. Early life Burke was born on June 7, 1928 in Brighton, Boston. He had two sisters, Sarah Berenson and Clare Malloy.

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