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,

#1751

Charles L. Kane

Charles L. Kane

#39894

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Charles L. Kane is a theoretical condensed matter physicist and is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed a B.S. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1985 and his Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania he was a postdoctoral associate at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center working with his mentor Matthew P. A. Fisher, among others.

#1752

Vishnu Vasudev Narlikar

#30585

Overall Influence

1908 - 1991 (83 years)

Vishnu Vasudev Narlikar FRAS was an Indian physicist specializing in general relativity. He is considered "the doyen of General Relativity in India." The Centre for Theoretical Physics, Jamia Millia Islamia has instituted the annual "V. V. Narikar Memorial Lecture" in memory of him.

#1753

Donat Wentzel

#51845

Overall Influence

1934 - 2013 (79 years)

Donat G. Wentzel was an American astrophysicist, best known as astronomy educator of undergraduates, graduates, and young researchers. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he established himself in plasma astrophysics, working on cosmic magnetism and electrical currents flowing both between the stars and on the Sun. His outstanding contribution was on Alfven waves driven by cosmic rays and the emission processes of solar flares at radio waves. His book on the “Restless Sun,” written for undergraduates, was named Book of the Year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1989. Wentzel received 2003 the George Van Biesbroeck Prize.

#1754

Kirpal Nandra

#58386

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Kirpal "Paul" Nandra is a British physicist and the current director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. He was Professor of Astrophysics and Head of the Astrophysics Group at Imperial College London.

#1755

Gilbert Plass

#20326

Overall Influence

1920 - 2004 (84 years)

Gilbert Norman Plass was a Canadian physicist who in the 1950s made predictions about the increase in global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the 20th century and its effect on the average temperature of the planet that closely match measurements reported half a century later.

#1756

Friedrich Wagner

#59501

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Friedrich E. Wagner is a German physicist and emeritus professor who specializes in plasma physics. He was known to have discovered the high-confinement mode of magnetic confinement in fusion plasmas while working at the ASDEX tokamak in 1982. For this discovery and his subsequent contributions to fusion research, was awarded the John Dawson Award in 1987, the Hannes Alfvén Prize in 2007 and the Stern–Gerlach Medal in 2009.

#1757

Benjamin Zuckerman

#57317

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Benjamin Michael Zuckerman is an astrophysicist and an emeritus professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA. His recent work focus primarily on formation and evolution of planetary systems around various types of stars.

#1758

E.G.D. Cohen

#40016

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

#1759

D. Allan Bromley

D. Allan Bromley

#33045

Overall Influence

1926 - 2005 (79 years)

David Allan Bromley was a Canadian-American physicist, academic administrator and science advisor to President George H. W. Bush. His field of research was the study of low-energy nuclear reactions and structure using heavy ion beams.

#1760

Stephen Barr

#26762

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Stephen Matthew Barr is an American physicist who is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Delaware. A member of its Bartol Research Institute, Barr does research in theoretical particle physics and cosmology. In 2011, he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, the citation reading "for original contributions to grand unified theories, CP violation, and baryogenesis."

#1761

Stefano Cristiani

#63209

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Stefano Cristiani, is an Italian astronomer and astrophysicist. Career Cristiani graduated in Physics at the University of Rome La Sapienza, carrying out his thesis work at the Asiago Astrophysical Observatory. He held a post-doctoral and staff positions at the European Southern Observatory, La Silla Observatory, University of Padua, and Trieste Astronomical Observatory. He has been director of the Trieste Astronomical Observatory from 2005 to 2010 and a member of the Board of INAF from 2011 to 2013.

#1762

Walker Bleakney

Walker Bleakney

#29892

Overall Influence

1901 - 1992 (91 years)

Walker Bleakney was an American physicist, one of inventors of mass spectrometers, and widely noted for his research in the fields of atomic physics, molecular physics, fluid dynamics, the ionization of gases, and blast waves. Bleakney was the chair of the department of physics at Princeton University. He was the head of the Princeton Ballistic Project during World War II.

#1763

Laura Greene

#50470

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Laura H. Greene is the Marie Krafft Professor of Physics at Florida State University and chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. She was previously a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In September 2021, she was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .

#1764

Jack H. Freed

#53646

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Jack H. Freed is an American chemist known for his pioneering work in electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy. He is the Frank and Robert Laughlin Professor of Physical Chemistry, emeritus, at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

#1765

Irina Grigorieva

#52394

Overall Influence

Irina Grigorieva, Lady Geim is a Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester and Director of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Centre for Doctoral Training in Science and the Applications of Graphene. She was awarded the 2019 David Tabor Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics and was elected as a Fellow of the Institute.

#1766

John Bryan Taylor

#37302

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

John Bryan Taylor is a British physicist known for his contributions to plasma physics and their application in the field of fusion energy. Notable among these is the development of the "Taylor state", describing a minimum-energy configuration that conserves magnetic helicity. Another development was his work on the ballooning transformation, which describes the motion of plasma in toroidal configurations, which are used in the fusion field. Taylor has also made contributions to the theory of the Earth's Dynamo, including the Taylor constraint.

#1767

Günter Nimtz

#34339

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Günter Nimtz is a German physicist, working at the 2nd Physics Institute at the University of Cologne in Germany. He has investigated narrow-gap semiconductors and liquid crystals. His claims show that particles may travel faster than the speed of light when undergoing quantum tunneling.

#1768

John F. Allen

#35673

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

John Frank Allen, FRS FRSE was a Canadian-born physicist. At the same time as Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa in Moscow, Don Misener and Allen independently discovered the superfluid phase of matter in 1937 using liquid helium in the Royal Society Mond Laboratory in Cambridge, England.

#1769

Édouard Brézin

#23937

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Édouard Brézin is a French theoretical physicist. He is professor at Université Paris 6, working at the laboratory for theoretical physics of the École Normale Supérieure since 1986. Biography Brézin was born in Paris, France, to agnostic Jewish parents from Poland. His father served in the French army during World War II and was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, but escaped, The family used false names and Brézin was hidden by farmers.

#1770

Colin Humphreys

Colin Humphreys

#19348

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Sir Colin John Humphreys, is a British physicist. He is the Professor of Materials Science at Queen Mary University of London. He is the former Goldsmiths' Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge and the Professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal Institution in London. He served as President of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining in 2002 and 2003. His research interests include "all aspects of electron microscopy and analysis, semiconductors , ultra-high temperature aerospace materials and superconductors." Humphreys also "studies the Bible when not purs...

#1771

Kerry Vahala

#35736

Overall Influence

Kerry J. Vahala is an American professor of Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology . He holds the Ted and Ginger Jenkins chair of Information Science and Technology and also serves as the Executive Officer of the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Physics and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering, all from Caltech.

#1772

Reuven Ramaty

#58980

Overall Influence

1937 - 2001 (64 years)

Dr. Reuven Ramaty was a Hungarian astrophysicist who worked for 30 years at NASA's NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre. He was a leader in the fields of solar physics, gamma-ray line spectrometry, nuclear astrophysics, and low-energy cosmic rays. Ramaty was a founding member of NASA's High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager which has now been renamed the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager in his honour. This was the first space mission to be named after a NASA scientist and was operational from 2002 until 2018. The Online Archive of California holds over 400 entries for documents, papers and photographs published by and of Ramaty and his work.

#1773

Knut Urban

#28136

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Knut W. Urban is a German physicist. He has been the Director of the Institute of Microstructure Research at Forschungszentrum Jülich from 1987 to 2010. Knut Urban's research focuses on the field of aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy , the examination of structural defects in oxides and the physical properties of complex metallic alloys. He also works on Josephson effects in high-temperature superconductors and the application of these effects in SQUID systems and magnetometers as well as on the application of Hilbert transform spectroscopy in examining the excitation of so...

#1774

Kim Jihn-eui

#62297

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Kim Jihn-eui is a South Korean theoretical physicist. His research interests concentrate on particle physics and cosmology and has many contributions to the field, most notably the suggestion of the invisible axion.

#1775

Wade Allison

#46059

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Wade Allison is a British physicist who is Emeritus professor of Physics and Fellow of Keble College at Oxford University. Author of Nuclear is for Life: A Cultural Revolution, Radiation and Reason: The Impact of Science on a Culture of Fear , Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging

#1776

Risa Wechsler

#56498

Overall Influence

Risa H. Wechsler is an American cosmological physicist, Professor of Physics at Stanford University, and Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She is the director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.

#1777

Otto Schmitt

#5971

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Otto Herbert Schmitt was an American inventor, engineer, and biophysicist known for his scientific contributions to biophysics and for establishing the field of biomedical engineering. Schmitt also coined the term biomimetics and invented or co-invented the Schmitt trigger, the differential amplifier, and the chopper-stabilized amplifier.

#1778

Norman Zabusky

#19202

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Norman J. Zabusky was an American physicist, who is noted for the discovery of the soliton in the Korteweg–de Vries equation, in work completed with Martin Kruskal. This result early in his career was followed by an extensive body of work in computational fluid dynamics, which led him in the latter years of his career to an examination of the importance of visualization in this field. In fact, he coined the term visiometrics to describe the process of using computer-aided visualization to guide one towards quantitative results.

#1779

Matilde Marcolli

Matilde Marcolli

#19274

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Matilde Marcolli is an Italian and American mathematical physicist. She has conducted research work in areas of mathematics and theoretical physics; obtained the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Marcolli has authored and edited numerous books in the field. She is currently the Robert F. Christy Professor of Mathematics and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.

#1780

William H. Jefferys

#32570

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

William Hamilton Jefferys III is an American astronomer. He is a Harlan J. Smith Centennial Professor of Astronomy of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Vermont.

#1781

Mike Irwin

#59145

Overall Influence

Michael J. Irwin is a British astronomer. He is the director of the Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit and one of the discoverers of the Cetus Dwarf galaxy and the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy.

#1782

Robert K. Logan

#9010

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Robert K. Logan , originally trained as a physicist, is a media ecologist. Career He received from MIT a BS in 1961 and a PhD in 1965 under the supervision of Francis E. Low. After two post-doctoral appointments as a research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Toronto , he became a physics professor in 1968 at Toronto until his retirement in 2005. He is now professor emeritus. He is a fellow of St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, the Origins Institute at McMaster University and Institute of Biocomplexity and Informatics at the Universi...

#1783

Kenneth M. Watson

#22703

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (103 years)

Kenneth Marshall Watson was an American theoretical physicist and physical oceanographer. Life and career Watson graduated in 1943 with BS in electrical engineering from Iowa State College. From 1943 to 1946 he was a researcher at the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. During his work for the U.S. Navy he went to night school at George Washington University. He graduated from the University of Iowa with Ph.D. in 1948 with thesis The polarizability of the meson-charge cloud of a neutron in an external electrostatic field. He was from 1948 to 1949 an Atomic Energy Commi...

#1784

Jacques Prost

#19240

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Jacques Prost, born in 1946 in Bourg-en-Bresse, is a French physicist, former General director of École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris, member of the French Academy of Sciences.

#1785

Steven S. Vogt

#61644

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Steven Scott Vogt is an American astronomer of German descent whose main interest is the search for extrasolar planets. He is credited, along with R. Paul Butler, for discovering Gliese 581 g, the first potentially habitable planet outside of the Solar System.

#1786

Ayşe Erzan

#27622

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ayşe Erzan is a Turkish theoretical physicist. She has received a number of awards including a L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science in 2003 and a Rammal Award in 2009. Biography Ayşe Erzan was born in 1949 in Ankara. Following secondary studies in Istanbul, Erzan attended Bryn Mawr College in the United States, earning her BA in 1970. She received a PhD in physics from Stony Brook University in 1976.

#1787

Michael Horne

#43206

Overall Influence

1943 - 2019 (76 years)

Michael Allan Horne was an American quantum physicist, known for his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics. Biography Horne studied at the University of Mississippi and earned his doctorate in physics at Boston University with Abner Shimony. He taught at Stonehill College, a catholic school in Easton in the south of Boston.

#1788

Alexey Vikhlinin

Alexey Vikhlinin

#49035

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Alexey Vikhlinin is a Russian-American astrophysicist notable for achievements in the astrophysics of high energy phenomenon, namely galaxy cluster cosmology and the design of space-based X-ray observatories. He is currently a senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was recently the Science and Technology Definition Team Community Co-Chair for the Lynx X-ray Observatory, a NASA-funded Large Mission Concept Study under consideration by the 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy an...

#1789

Alex Zettl

#16236

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Alex K. Zettl is an American experimental physicist, educator, and inventor. He is a Professor of the Graduate School in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Zettl is a leading expert in the synthesis, characterization, and application of low dimensional materials. He has synthesized and studied new materials, notably those based on carbon, boron and nitrogen, and has made numerous inventions in the field of electronic materials and nano-electromechanical systems. Zettl and his research team were the first to synthesize boron nitride nanotubes, and created carbon nanotube chemical sensors.

#1790

David M. Brink

#56606

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

David Maurice Brink was an Australian-British nuclear physicist. He is known for the Axel-Brink hypothesis. Education and career Brink matriculated in 1947 at the University of Tasmania, where he graduated with a B.Sc. in physics in 1951. As a Rhodes Scholar he became a graduate student in physics at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he received his PhD in 1955. His doctoral dissertation Some aspects of the interactions of light with matter was supervised by Maurice Pryce. From 1954 to 1958 Brink was a Rutherford Scholar of the Royal Society. For the academic year 1957–1958 he was an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

#1791

Julieta Norma Fierro Gossman

Julieta Norma Fierro Gossman

#48418

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Julieta Norma Fierro Gossman , better known as Julieta Fierro, is a Mexican astrophysicist and science communicator. She is a full researcher at the Institute of Astronomy and professor of the Sciences Faculty at the National Autonomous University of Mexico . She is part of the Researchers National System in Mexico, holding a level III position. Since 2004 she is a member of the Mexican Academy of Language.

#1792

Nicholas P. Samios

#62052

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Nicholas P. Samios is an American physicist and former director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. Biography He majored in physics at Columbia College of Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1953; he earned his PhD at Columbia in 1957. He worked on the Columbia faculty for three years before joining Brookhaven's physics department, where he was appointed laboratory director in May 1982. A major achievement of his tenure was the construction of the RHIC, the first heavy-ion collider. He stepped down as director in 1997 after a dispute on leaked radioactivity in the laboratory, but continued to work as a researcher.

#1793

Ruth Nussinov

#40744

Overall Influence

Ruth Nussinov is an Israeli-American biologist born in Rehovot who works as a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and is the Senior Principal Scientist and Principal Investigator at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. Nussinov is also the Editor in Chief of the Current Opinion in Structural Biology and formerly of the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

#1794

Steven Cowley

#21886

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sir Steven Charles Cowley is a British theoretical physicist and international authority on nuclear fusion and astrophysical plasmas. He has served as director of the United States Department of Energy Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory since 1 July 2018. Previously he served as president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, since October 2016. and head of the EURATOM / CCFE Fusion Association and chief executive officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority .

#1795

Josef Gitelson

#53610

Overall Influence

1928 - 2022 (94 years)

Josef Isaevich Gitelson ; was a Soviet and Russian biophysicist. PhD in biology , DrSc in medicine , Professor, Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences ; Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences , Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences . Director of Institute of Biophysics, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences . Academic Advisor at this Institute since 1996. Scientific supervisor of Institute of Fundamental Biology and Biotechnology Siberian Federal University. Member of International Academy of Astronautics. Honorary Citizen of Krasnoyarsk Krai since Sept 20, 2013 and the city of Krasnoyarsk.

#1796

James Sayers

#40637

Overall Influence

1912 - 1993 (81 years)

James Sayers was a Northern Irish physicist who played a crucial role in developing centimetric radar, which is now used in microwave ovens. Early life He was born on a farm in Corkey, County Antrim, Ireland. He built a water wheel to provide the farm with electricity.

#1797

Charles T. Kowal

Charles T. Kowal

#31690

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

Charles Thomas Kowal was an American astronomer known for his observations and discoveries in the Solar System. As a staff astronomer at Caltech's Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain observatories between 1961 and 1984, he found the first of a new class of Solar System objects, the centaurss, discovered two moons of the planet Jupiter, and discovered or co-discovered a number of asteroids, comets and supernovae. He was awarded the James Craig Watson Medal for his contributions to astronomy in 1979.

#1798

Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara

Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara

#27438

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Fotini G. Markopoulou-Kalamara is a Greek theoretical physicist interested in quantum gravity, foundational mathematics, quantum mechanics and a design engineer working on embodied cognition technologies. Markopoulou is co-founder and CEO of Empathic Technologies. She was a founding faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and was an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo.

#1799

Megan Donahue

#51737

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Megan Donahue is an American astronomer who studies galaxies and galaxy clusters. She is a professor of physics and astrophysics at Michigan State University, and the president of the American Astronomical Society for the 2018–2020 term.

#1800

Yoshiki Kuramoto

#25684

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Yoshiki Kuramoto is a Japanese physicist in the Nonlinear Dynamics group at Kyoto University who formulated the Kuramoto model and is also known for the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation. He is also the discoverer of so-called chimera states in networks of coupled oscillators.

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