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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,

#1651

Alessandro Vespignani

Alessandro Vespignani

#21097

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Alessandro Vespignani is an Italian-American physicist, best known for his work on complex networks, and particularly for work on the applications of network theory to the mathematical modeling of infectious disease, applications of computational epidemiology, and for studies of the topological properties of the Internet. He is currently the Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Computer Science and Health Sciences at Northeastern University, where he is the director of the Network Science Institute.

#1652

John A. Smolin

#29410

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

John A. Smolin is an American physicist and Fellow of the American Physical Society at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Smolin is best known for his work in quantum information theory, where, with collaborators, he introduced several important techniques, including entanglement distillation, for quantum error-correction and the faithful transmission of quantum information through noisy quantum channels, as well as for entanglement-assisted transmission of classical information. He helped elucidate the complex relations between classical and quantum capacities of various channels as we...

#1653

Robert C. Dynes

#17446

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Robert Carr Dynes is a Canadian-American physicist, researcher, and academic administrator, and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the former president of the University of California system, and former chancellor of the University of California San Diego.

#1654

Ofer Lahav

#47854

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Ofer Lahav is Perren Chair of Astronomy at University College London , Vice-Dean of the UCL Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Co-Director of the STFC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Intensive Science. His research area is Observational Cosmology, in particular probing Dark Matter and Dark Energy. His work involves Machine Learning for Big Data.

#1655

Kapil Hari Paranjape

Kapil Hari Paranjape

#18094

Overall Influence

Kapil Hari Paranjape is an Indian mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali. Biography He was born in Mumbai, Maharashtra near the Kabootar Khana in Dadar but grew up in New Delhi. He completed his schooling from the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in 1977. He then joined the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur where he pursued a five-years integrated Master’s programme in Mathematics and graduated in 1982. He was awarded the General Proficiency Prize for Mathematics from IIT Kanpur in 1982.

#1656

Itamar Procaccia

Itamar Procaccia

#41585

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Itamar Procaccia is an Israeli physicist and chemist who has made contributions to areas in statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, soft matter, and turbulence. Procaccia studied chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with and obtained a bachelor's degree in 1973 and obtained a doctorate in theoretical chemistry in 1976. From 1977 to 1979, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1979 he has been at the Weizmann Institute, where he became a professor in 1985.

#1657

Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh

#38471

Overall Influence

1933 - 2000 (67 years)

Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh was an Irish physicist in the field of theoretical particle physics. He is best known for the O'Raifeartaigh Theorem, a result in unification theory, and the O'Raifeartaigh Model of supersymmetry breaking.

#1658

Winfried Denk

#11627

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Winfried Denk is a German physicist. He built the first two-photon microscope while he was a graduate student in Watt W. Webb's lab at Cornell University, in 1989. Early life and education Denk was born in Munich, Germany. As a child he spent most of his playtime learning to use the tools and building materials in his father's workshop. In school it became apparent that Denk’s ‘talents were unevenly spread across subjects, math and physics being favored’. Fixing and constructing electronic devices was his main hobby throughout high school.

#1659

Athene Donald

#19325

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dame Athene Margaret Donald is a British physicist. She is Professor Emerita of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge. Early life and education Donald was born Athene Margaret Griffith in London, to Walter Griffith and Annette Marian Tylor. She was educated at Camden School for Girls and Girton College, Cambridge. She earned a bachelor's degree in Natural Science , followed by a PhD in 1977 for research on electron microscopy of grain boundary embrittled systems.

#1660

Stan Bentvelsen

Stan Bentvelsen

#62398

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Stanislaus Cornelius Maria Bentvelsen is a Dutch physicist. He is the director of Nikhef since 2014. Bentvelsen studied Physics at the Universiteit van Amsterdam . In 1994 he completed his thesis at the UvA in 1994

#1661

James C. Fletcher

James C. Fletcher

#15504

Overall Influence

1919 - 1991 (72 years)

James Chipman Fletcher served as the 4th and 7th Administrator of NASA, first from April 27, 1971 to May 1, 1977, under President Richard M. Nixon, and again from May 12, 1986 to April 8, 1989, under President Ronald Reagan. As such, he was responsible for Apollo Moon missions 15, 16, and 17, the early planning of the Space Shuttle program, and later for the shuttle program's recovery and return to flight after the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. Prior to this, he was president of the University of Utah from 1964 to 1971.

#1662

M. Shahid Qureshi

M. Shahid Qureshi

#29234

Overall Influence

Muhammad Shahid Qureshi or Shahid Qureshi, styled as M. Shahid Qureshi, is a Pakistani mathematician, astrophysicist and a renowned astronomer. He is an academic and an eminent educationist from Pakistan who has published articles in the fields of astrophysics and astronomy. He is the retired professor of astrophysics and astronomy at Karachi University and Institute of Space and Planetary Astrophysics , and former director of ISPA, the country's prominent institution in the field of planetary astrophysics and planetary astronomy. He previously served as an assistant professor of mathematics and computer science.

#1663

Konrad Osterwalder

#16658

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Konrad Osterwalder is a Swiss mathematician and physicist, former Undersecretary-General of the United Nations, former Rector of the United Nations University , and Rector Emeritus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich . He is known for the Osterwalder–Schrader theorem.

#1664

Atlas Electromagnetic Barrel Calorimeter Collaboration

#62528

Overall Influence

#1665

Desmond King-Hele

#33205

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Desmond George King-Hele FRS was a British physicist, poet and author who crossed the divide between the arts and science to write extensively about the life of Erasmus Darwin, whom he linked with the romantic poets Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In 1957, together with Doreen Gilmour, and as part of the Guided Weapons department of Royal Aircraft Establishment, he wrote a report proposing the use of the Blue Streak missile and Black Knight as a satellite launcher. See also Blue Streak Satellite Launch Vehicle.

#1666

Mark B. Gerstein

#47720

Overall Influence

Mark Bender Gerstein is an American scientist working in bioinformatics and Data Science. , he is co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program. Mark Gerstein is Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry , Professor of Statistics & Data Science, and Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. In 2018, Gerstein was named co-director of the Yale Center for Biomedical Data Science.

#1667

Sebastian Doniach

#53131

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Sebastian Doniach is a British-American physicist and professor at Stanford University. His research interests include theoretical condensed matter physics, superconductivity, and biophysics. Family His mother was the distinguished clinical immunologist Deborah Doniach and his father was Israel "Sonny" Doniach . Sebastian had one sibling, a sister Vera .

#1668

Emilio Elizalde

#39811

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Emilio Elizalde is a Spanish physicist working in the fields of gravitational physics and general relativity. Of Basque heritage, he was born in Balaguer, about 25 km northeast of Lleida, the province capital. He finished double undergraduate majors in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Barcelona in 1972 and 1973, followed by a masters and later a Ph.D. degree at the same institution. In 1977, he married Maria Carmen Torrent, who is currently Professor of Applied Physics at the Technical University of Catalonia. The years immediately after the death of Franco were chaotic, offering...

#1669

Steven Block

#32196

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Steven M. Block is an American biophysicist and Professor at Stanford University with a joint appointment in the departments of Biology and Applied Physics. In addition, he is a member of the scientific advisory group JASON, a senior fellow of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and an amateur bluegrass musician. Block received his B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University. He has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and is a winner of the Max Delbruck Prize of the American Physical Society , as well as the Single Molecule Biophysics Prize of the Biophysical Society .

#1670

Tony Hey

#14596

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Professor Anthony John Grenville Hey was vice-president of Microsoft Research Connections, a division of Microsoft Research, until his departure in 2014. Education Hey was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and the University of Oxford. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics in 1967, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics in 1970 supervised by P. K. Kabir. He was a student of Worcester College, Oxford and St John's College, Oxford.

#1671

Joseph A. Burns

#47642

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Joseph Burns is a professor at Cornell University with a dual appointment in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Astronomy department. His primary area of research is dynamics in planetary sciences.

#1672

William E. Caswell

William E. Caswell

#39617

Overall Influence

1947 - 2001 (54 years)

William Edward Caswell was an American physicist. He did work in quantum gauge theory, most notably, his 1972 calculation of the beta function to two-loop accuracy. His pioneering work in the days of FORTRAN and punch cards demonstrated the potential of computer algebra. Caswell died during the September 11 attacks as a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon.

#1673

Richard Massey

#60584

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Richard Massey is a physicist currently working as Royal Society Research Fellow in the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University. Previously he was a senior research fellow in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology and STFC Advanced Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Edinburgh. Massey graduated in Maths and Physics from the University of Durham in 2000 and was a member of Castle. He completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge in 2003, with a thesis entitled Weighing the Universe with weak gravitational lensing.

#1674

Robert Shaw

#5341

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Robert Stetson Shaw is an American physicist who was part of Eudaemonic Enterprises in Santa Cruz in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1988 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in chaos theory.

#1675

David Grinspoon

David Grinspoon

#20164

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

David H. Grinspoon is an American astrobiologist. He is Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and was the former inaugural Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology for 2012–2013.

#1676

Erich Sackmann

#36203

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Erich Sackmann is a German experimental physicist and a pioneer of biophysics in Europe. Career Sackmann obtained his MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Stuttgart in the group of Theodor Förster. He then spent two years at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and six years at Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. Between 1974 and 1980 he was professor of physics and head of the biophysics department at Universität Ulm, and from 1980 until retirement in 2003 he held the same positions at the Physics Department of the Technical Univer...

#1677

Michel Davier

#35218

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michel Davier is a French physicist. Graduate of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud , he was Director of the Laboratory of Linear Accelerator in Orsay from 1985 to 1994. Winner of the Gentner-Kastler Prize in 1994, he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1996. He was appointed senior member of the Institut universitaire de France in 1991 for a five-year term, renewed in 1996.

#1678

Gustavo E Scuseria

#62984

Overall Influence

#1679

William Luther Pierce

William Luther Pierce

#4875

Overall Influence

1933 - 2002 (69 years)

William Luther Pierce III was an American neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and far-right political activist. For more than 30 years, he was one of the highest-profile individuals of the white nationalist movement. A physicist by profession, he was author of the novels The Turner Diaries and Hunter under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. The former has inspired multiple hate crimes including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Pierce founded the white nationalist National Alliance, an organization which he led for almost 30 years.

#1680

Louise Dolan

#49914

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Louise Ann Dolan is an American mathematical physicist and professor of physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She does research in theoretical particle physics, gauge theories, gravity, and string theory, and is generally considered to be one of the foremost experts worldwide in this field. Her work is at the forefront of particle physics today.

#1681

Edward Trifonov

Edward Trifonov

#19246

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Edward Nikolayevich Trifonov is a Russian-born Israeli molecular biophysicist and a founder of Israeli bioinformatics. In his research, he specializes in the recognition of weak signal patterns in biological sequences and is known for his unorthodox scientific methods.

#1682

Bernhard W. Roth

#42797

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Bernhard Wilhelm Roth is a German experimental physicist. Scientific career From 1992 to 1997 Roth studied physics at the Universität Bielefeld from where he obtained his diploma in physics. He received his doctoral degree in the field of atomic and particle physics at the Universität Bielefeld. From 2002 to 2007 her worked as assistant professor and group leader in experimental quantum optics at the Institute for Experimental Physics, Quantum Optics and Relativity Group at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. In 2007 Roth obtained his state doctorate in experimental physics in the fi...

#1683

Sajeev John

#17613

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Sajeev John, OC, FRSC is a Professor of Physics at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair holder. He is known for his discovery of photonic crystals. Education and career He received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1984. His Ph.D. work at Harvard introduced the theory of classical wave localization and, in particular, the localization of light in three-dimensional strongly scattering dielectrics. From 1984–1986 he was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Ca...

#1684

Allan Snyder

#11254

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Allan Whitenack Snyder is the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Australia where he also holds the 150th Anniversary Chair of Science and the Mind. He is a co-founder of Emotiv Systems and winner of the International Australia Prize in 1997 and the Marconi Prize in 2001 for his contributions to optical physics. Snyder is also the Creator and Chairman of the What Makes a Champion? forum, an official Olympic cultural event first held at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. He is also the Chair of Research on the MindChamps World Research, Advisory and Education Team, wit...

#1685

John M. Dawson

#39580

Overall Influence

1930 - 2001 (71 years)

John Myrick Dawson was an American computational physicist and the father of plasma-based acceleration techniques. Dawson earned his degrees in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park: a B.S. in 1952 and Ph.D. in 1957. His thesis "Distortion of Atoms and Molecules in Dense Media" was prepared under the guidance of Zaka Slawsky.

#1686

Jonathan Ashmore

Jonathan Ashmore

#27763

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jonathan Felix Ashmore is a British physicist and Bernard Katz Professor of Biophysics at University College London. Early life and education He is the son of Rosalie Crutchley who played Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities.

#1687

Lyn Evans

#22569

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Lyn Evans CBE FINSTP FLSW FRS , is a Welsh scientist who served as the project leader of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Based at CERN, in 2012 he became the director of the Linear Collider Collaboration, an international organisation managing development of next generation particle colliders, including the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider.

#1688

Werner Döring

#9737

Overall Influence

1911 - 2006 (95 years)

Werner Döring was a German theoretical physicist. From 1963 until his retirement in 1977, he was an ordinary professor at the University of Hamburg. His main interest was the theory of magnetism. His textbooks on theoretical physics have influenced several generations of students.

#1689

Robert G. Jahn

#12826

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Robert George Jahn was an American plasma physicist, Professor of Aerospace Science, and Dean of Engineering at Princeton University. Jahn was also a founder of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab , a parapsychology research program which ran from 1979 to 2007.

#1690

Menas Kafatos

#14845

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Menas C. Kafatos is a Greek-born American physicist and a writer on spirituality and science. His publications include: The Nonlocal Universe and The Conscious Universe. Kafatos has written and lectured extensively promoting discourse between science, spirituality, and religion. He has held numerous positions at institutions including Chapman University, George Mason University, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

#1691

Stavros Katsanevas

Stavros Katsanevas

#51455

Overall Influence

1953 - 2022 (69 years)

Stavros Katsanevas was a Greek-French astrophysicist who was director of the European Gravitational Observatory, professor at the Université Paris Cité, former director of the AstroParticle and Cosmology laboratory and former chairman of the Astroparticle Physics European Consortium . In 2000, he received for his work on supersymmetry the Physics Prize from the Academy of Athens. In 2011, he was awarded the Ordre National du Merite. He was an ordinary member of Academy of Europe, Earth and Cosmic Sciences since 2019.

#1692

Ludwik Leibler

#18394

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Ludwik Leibler, born in 1952 is a Polish-born French physicist. He is Professor of École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris and member of the French Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering.

#1693

Jacques Laskar

#31516

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jacques Laskar is a French astronomer. He is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research , and a member of Astronomy and dynamical systems of the Institute of Celestial Mechanics and Computation of Ephemerides of the Paris Observatory. He received the CNRS Silver Medal in 1994 and the Milutin Milankovic Medal in 2019. Since 2003, he is a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

#1694

Boris Kerner

#15182

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Boris S. Kerner is a German physicist and civil engineer who created three phase traffic theory. The three phase traffic theory is the framework for the description of empirical vehicular traffic states in three traffic phases: free traffic flow , synchronized traffic flow , and wide moving jam . The synchronized traffic flow and wide moving jam phases belong to congested traffic.

#1695

Robert W. Boyd

#43627

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Robert William Boyd is an American physicist noted for his work in optical physics and especially in nonlinear optics. He is currently the Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate in Quantum Nonlinear Optics based at the University of Ottawa, professor of physics cross-appointed to the school of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Ottawa, and professor of optics and professor of physics at the University of Rochester.

#1696

David Ceperley

#49667

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

David Matthew Ceperley is a theoretical physicist in the physics department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UIUC. He is a world expert in the area of Quantum Monte Carlo computations, a method of calculation that is generally recognised to provide accurate quantitative results for many-body problems described by quantum mechanics.

#1697

Paolo Maffei

#43166

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Paolo Maffei was an Italian astrophysicist and science writer. He was born in Arezzo and was director of the Catania Observatory and an astronomer at Arcetri, Bologna, Asiago and Hamburg. He studied comets, variable stars, galaxies and the evolution of the universe. An internationally renowned astronomer, he was one of the pioneers of infrared astronomy research. In 1968 he discovered through infrared analysis two galaxies, otherwise unobservable because their light emission in the visible frequencies is absorbed by the dust that fills the plane of the Milky Way. The two galaxies were named after him: Maffei-1 and Maffei-2.

#1698

Abraham H. Taub

Abraham H. Taub

#7726

Overall Influence

1911 - 1999 (88 years)

Abraham Haskel Taub was a distinguished American mathematician and physicist who made important contributions to the early development of general relativity, as well as differential geometry and differential equations.

#1699

John Currie Gunn

#20961

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Sir John Currie Gunn was an influential Scottish mathematician and physicist. Early life and education Gunn was born at 19 Kelvinside Gardens East, Glasgow, the son of Richard Robertson Gunn, a tailor and clothier, and his wife, Jane Blair, née Currie.

#1700

David P. Landau

#45306

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David P. Landau is distinguished research professor of physics and founding director of the Center for Simulational Physics at the University of Georgia. In 1967, he received his PhD at Yale University under the direction of Werner P. Wolf. Two years later, he moved to the University of Georgia. Although intending to continue experimental research, he instead initiated high-quality Monte Carlo studies of phase transitions. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He won the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics, the highest award in computational physics given by the American Physical Society.

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