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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,

#1801

Sarafina Nance

#38749

Overall Influence

Sarafina El-Badry Nance is an Egyptian-American science communicator, astrophysicist and Ph.D. student in the Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on supernovae and their applications to cosmology. Nance is known for her use of social media, in particular Twitter, where she discusses astrophysics and activism. She is also an advocate for women's health and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

#1802

Chushiro Hayashi

Chushiro Hayashi

#24110

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

was a Japanese astrophysicist. Hayashi tracks on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram are named after him. Hayashi was born in Kyoto and enrolled at the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1940, earning his BSc in Physics after 2½ years, in 1942. He was conscripted into the navy and, after the war ended, joined the group of Hideki Yukawa at Kyoto University. He was appointed a professor at Kyoto University in 1957.

#1803

Huang Kun

#27875

Overall Influence

1919 - 2005 (86 years)

Huang Kun was a Chinese physicist and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award by President Jiang Zemin in 2001. Born in Beijing, China, in 1919, Huang graduated from Yenching University with a degree in physics. In 1948, he earned his PhD from the H. H. Wills Physics Lab of Bristol University in England and continued his postdoctoral studies at Liverpool University, where he coauthored the book Dynamical Theory of Crystal Lattices with Max Born between 1949 and 1951.

#1804

Michael E. Phelps

#66320

Overall Influence

#1805

Joseph Lykken

#37953

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Joseph David Lykken is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and, from July 1, 2014 to Sept 6, 2022, he was the Deputy Director of Fermilab. He is currently leading the Fermilab Quantum Institute.

#1806

Martin Freer

#32012

Overall Influence

Martin Freer is a British Nuclear Physicist, professor, and was previously head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham. He won the 2010 Rutherford Medal and Prize for establishing the existence of nuclear configurations analogous to molecules.

#1807

Giovanni Gallavotti

Giovanni Gallavotti

#25246

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Giovanni Gallavotti is an Italian mathematical physicist, born in Naples on 29 December 1941. He is the recipient of the "Premio Nazionale Presidente della Repubblica", presso la Classe di Scienze Naturali dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 18 June 1997, and the Boltzmann Medal awarded by IUPAP- International Union of Pure and Applied Physics

#1808

Bernardo Huberman

Bernardo Huberman

#10784

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Bernardo Huberman is a fellow and vice president of the Next-Gen Systems Team at CableLabs. He is also a consulting professor in the Department of Applied Physics and the Symbolic System Program at Stanford University.

#1809

Jeffrey Mandula

#32335

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Jeffrey Ellis Mandula is a physicist well known for the Coleman–Mandula theorem from 1967. He got his Ph.D. 1966 under Sidney Coleman at Harvard University. Thereafter he was a professor of applied mathematics at MIT and then of physics at Washington University in St. Louis. Today, he is responsible for the funding of science in the U.S. Department of Energy.

#1810

Richard Slansky

#34752

Overall Influence

1940 - 1998 (58 years)

Richard C. Slansky was an American theoretical physicist. Slansky received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University and his PhD under Elliot Leader from the University of California, Berkeley. As a post-doc he was at Caltech and then for five years at Yale University, before he joined in 1974 the newly founded theory group for particle physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory under Peter A. Carruthers. In 1989 he became head of the theory group. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of California, Irvine. He died of a brain aneurysm.

#1811

André Guinier

#16199

Overall Influence

1911 - 2000 (89 years)

André Guinier was a French physicist who did important work in the field of X-ray diffraction and solid-state physics. Career He worked at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, then taught at the University of Paris and later at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, where he co-founded the Laboratory of Solid State Physics. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1971 and won the Gregori Aminoff Prize in 1985.

#1812

Bruce Jakosky

#39522

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Bruce Martin Jakosky is a professor of Geological Sciences and associate director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has been involved with the Viking, Solar Mesosphere Explorer, Clementine, Mars Observer, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Science Laboratory and MAVEN spacecraft missions, and is involved in planning future spacecraft missions.

#1813

Nikolai Shakura

Nikolai Shakura

#37760

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Nikolai Ivanovich Shakura is a Russian astrophysicist. He is the head of the relativistic astrophysics department at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University. As a well-known specialist in the theory of accretion disks, as well as X-ray binaries, together with Rashid Sunyaev, he is particularly famous as the developer of the standard theory of disk accretion.

#1814

Thomas Ypsilantis

#50001

Overall Influence

1928 - 2000 (72 years)

Thomas John Ypsilantis was an American physicist of Greek descent. Ypsilantis was known for the co-discovery of the antiproton in 1955, along with Owen Chamberlain, Emilio Segrè, and Clyde Wiegand. Following this work, he moved to CERN to develop Cherenkov radiation detectors for use in particle physics.

#1815

Daniel S. Fisher

#45442

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Daniel S. Fisher is an American theoretical physicist working in statistical physics. Biography Daniel Fisher graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1975 and from Harvard University with a master's degree in physics in 1978 and a doctorate in physics in 1979 working with Bertrand Halperin. He then worked in the theoretical department at Bell Labs until 1987. In 1987 he became a professor of physics at Princeton University and in 1990 at Harvard. In 2005 he moved to Stanford University as a professor of applied physics.

#1816

Theodore A. Welton

#52821

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Theodore "Ted" Allen Welton was an American theoretical physicist best known as the co-author of the fluctuation dissipation theorem. During 1944 and 1945 he worked at Project Y in Los Alamos, New Mexico on nuclear weapons in Richard Feynman's T-4 Group after being recruited by Feynman.

#1817

Arnold O. Benz

#42879

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Arnold O. Benz is a professor emeritus at the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics in the Physics Department of ETH Zurich. Education and career Benz was educated at ETH Zurich, where he was awarded a diploma in theoretical physics in 1969. He then went to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he received a PhD in astrophysics for his research on the acceleration of the solar wind in 1973, under the supervision of Thomas Gold. After his return to ETH Zurich as a postdoc he focused on plasma physical processes in the solar corona. He led the Research Group on Radio Astronomy at the Institute for Astronomy from 1974 to 2010.

#1818

Eugen Merzbacher

#61587

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Eugen Merzbacher was an American physicist. Merzbacher was born in Berlin. Being a Jew, he emigrated in 1935 with his family from Germany to Turkey, where his father worked as a chemist. He received his licentiate from University of Istanbul in Turkey in 1943 and taught high school in Ankara for the next four years. In 1947 he moved to the United States to attend Harvard University, where he earned his M.A. and his Ph.D. with Julian Schwinger in 1950. During 1950/51, he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1951-52, Merzbacher was a visiting assistant professor at Duke University. In 1952 he joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

#1819

Víctor Manuel Blanco

#51434

Overall Influence

1918 - 2011 (93 years)

Víctor Manuel Blanco was a Puerto Rican astronomer who in 1959 discovered Blanco 1, a galactic cluster. Blanco was the second Director of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which had the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere at the time. In 1995, the 4-meter telescope was dedicated in his honor and named the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope; it is also known as the "Blanco 4m."

#1820

Emily Levesque

#57263

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Emily Levesque is an American astronomer and assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington. She is renowned for her work on massive stars and using these stars to investigate galaxy formation. In 2014, she received the Annie Jump Cannon Award for her innovative work on gamma ray bursts and the Sloan Fellowship in 2017. In 2015, Levesque, Rachel Bezanson, and Grant R. Tremblay published an influential paper, which critiqued the use of the Physics GRE as an admissions cutoff criterion for astronomy postgraduate programs by showing there was no statistical correlation between applicant's score and later success in their academic careers.

#1821

Friedwardt Winterberg

Friedwardt Winterberg

#24164

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Friedwardt Winterberg is a German-American theoretical physicist and was a research professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is known for his research in areas spanning general relativity, Planck scale physics, nuclear fusion, and plasmas. His work in nuclear rocket propulsion earned him the 1979 Hermann Oberth Gold Medal of the Wernher von Braun International Space Flight Foundation and a 1981 citation by the Nevada Legislature. He is also an honorary member of the German Aerospace Society Lilienthal-Oberth.

#1822

Martin A. Pomerantz

#40713

Overall Influence

1916 - 2008 (92 years)

Martin Arthur Pomerantz was an American physicist who served as director of the Bartol Research Institute and who had been a leader in developing Antarctic astronomy. When the astronomical observatory at the United States Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station was opened in 1995, it was named the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory in his honor. Pomerantz published his scientific autobiography, Astronomy on Ice, in 2004.

#1823

Andrew Joseph Galambos

#23901

Overall Influence

1924 - 1997 (73 years)

Andrew Joseph Galambos was an astrophysicist and philosopher who presented his revolutionary theories of freedom and Volitional Science in oral lectures through his Free Enterprise Institute from 1961 to 1989 in Los Angeles, California. He developed over 117 courses for FEI's curriculum over a period of twenty-eight years. As Galambos' literary executor, William W. Martin completed the all encompassing "Book One" that the professor intended to have published in written form which Martin published under the title Sic Itur Ad Astra . Within Sic Itur Ad Astra is the "roadmap to freedom" Course V-201: The Nature and Protection of Primary Property.

#1824

Julia Yeomans

#37481

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Julia Mary Yeomans is a British theoretical physicist active in the fields of soft condensed matter and biological physics. She has served as Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford since 2002.

#1825

Daniel Loss

#36910

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Daniel Loss is a Swiss theoretical physicist and a professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Basel and RIKEN. With David P. DiVincenzo , he proposed the Loss-DiVincenzo quantum computer in 1997, which would use electron spins in quantum dots as qubits.

#1826

Mendel Sachs

#32050

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

Mendel Sachs was an American theoretical physicist. His scientific work includes the proposal of a unified field theory that brings together the weak force, strong force, electromagnetism, and gravity.

#1827

Bruce Cork

#41064

Overall Influence

1916 - 1994 (78 years)

Bruce Cork was a physicist who discovered the antineutron in 1956 while working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He retired from Lawrence in 1986. He died October 7, 1994, at the age of 78 after a long illness.

#1828

Deborah Berebichez

Deborah Berebichez

#24115

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Deborah Berebichez is a Mexican physicist, data scientist, TV host, educator and entrepreneur who dedicates her career to promoting education in science, technology, engineering and math fields. She was the first Mexican woman to graduate with a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. She has developed models for cellular wave transmission which are in the process of being patented. Sometimes known as "The Science Babe", she appears in mainstream television and radio segments where she explains concepts in physics in everyday life.

#1829

Anton Zensus

#64263

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Johann Anton Zensus is a German radio astronomer. He is director at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and honorary professor at the University of Cologne. He is chairman of the collaboration board of the Event Horizon Telescope . The collaboration announced the first image of a black hole in April 2019.

#1830

Stephen Parke

#35338

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Stephen Parke is a New Zealand physicist. He is a distinguished scientist and former head of the Theoretical Physics Department at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory . Born in Gisborne, New Zealand, Parke attended Edmund Campion College, Gisborne and St Peter's College, Auckland and the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He was a graduate student of Sidney Coleman at Harvard University, obtaining a PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1980. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center before moving to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

#1831

Norman Christ

#44435

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Norman Howard Christ is a physicist and professor at Columbia University, where he holds the Ephraim Gildor Professorship of Computational Theoretical Physics. He is notable for his research in Lattice QCD.

#1832

Michael Kramer

#63866

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Michael Kramer is a German radio astronomer and astrophysicist. He currently serves as a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. He is also a professor at the University of Manchester and an Honorary Professor at the University of Bonn.

#1833

Eyvind Wichmann

#48698

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Eyvind Hugo Wichmann was an American theoretical physicist. Life Wichmann studied in Finland and finished his master studies 1953 at the Columbia University, following that with his PhD 1956. From 1955 to 1957 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1957 he became assistant professor and 1967 professor for physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Emeritus since 1993.

#1834

Young-Kee Kim

#51292

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Young-Kee Kim is a South Korea-born American physicist and Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. She is chair of the Department of Physics at the university.

#1835

Persis Drell

#24801

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Persis S. Drell is an American physicist best known for her expertise in the field of particle physics. She was the director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 2007 to 2012. She was dean of the Stanford University School of Engineering from 2014 until 2017. Drell has been the Provost of Stanford University since February 1, 2017. She plans to step down as Provost at the end of September 2023, and will be replaced by Jenny S. Martinez, dean of Stanford Law School.

#1836

Alan Hale

#33481

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Alan Hale is an American professional astronomer, who co-discovered Comet Hale–Bopp along with amateur astronomer Thomas Bopp. Hale specializes in the study of Sun-like stars and the search for extra-solar planetary systems, and has side interests in the fields of comets and near-Earth asteroids. He has been an active astronomer most of his life and currently serves as the president of the Earthrise Institute, which he founded, and which has as its mission the use of astronomy as a tool for breaking down international and intercultural barriers. The International Astronomical Union has named...

#1837

Chanchal Kumar Majumdar

Chanchal Kumar Majumdar

#29581

Overall Influence

1938 - 2000 (62 years)

Chanchal Kumar Majumdar was an Indian condensed matter physicist and the founder director of S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences. Known for his research in quantum mechanics, Majumdar was an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies – the Indian National Science Academy, the National Academy of Sciences, India, and the Indian Academy of Sciences – as well a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society.

#1838

Ken'ichi Nomoto

#64003

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Ken'ichi Nomoto is a Japanese astrophysicist and astronomer, known for his research on stellar evolution, supernovae, and the origin of heavy elements. Education and career Nomoto graduated in astronomy from the University of Tokyo with a BS in 1969 and a PhD in 1974. As a postdoc he was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. At Ibaraki University he was an assistant professor from 1976 to 1981. At the University of Tokyo he became an assistant professor in 1982, an associate professor in 1985, and a full professor in 1993. At the Kavli Institute for the Physics...

#1839

Vitaly Shafranov

#60591

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Vitaly Dmitrievich Shafranov was a Russian theoretical physicist and Academician who worked with plasma physics and thermonuclear fusion research. Life Vitaly Dmitrievich Shafranov was born in the village of Mordvinovo in Ryazan region in 1929. During World War II, Schafranov attended the school and worked together with his father building roads. In 1943 he got his first national award at the age 14. From 1946, Schafranov studied at the Physics Department of the Moscow State University. After graduating in 1951, he started to work with nuclear fusion in the Theory Department headed by Mikhai...

#1840

William E. Spicer

#61514

Overall Influence

1929 - 2004 (75 years)

William Edward Spicer was an American engineering academic. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on September 7, 1929, Spicer enrolled at the College of William and Mary, earning his first bachelor's degree in physics in 1949, followed by an equivalent degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951. He then attended University of Missouri, completing master's and doctoral degrees in the same subject in 1953 and 1955, respectively. Spicer then worked for the Radio Corporation of America until 1962, when he joined the Stanford University faculty. Spicer received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1978, the same year he was appointed Stanford W.

#1841

Alexander Kashlinsky

#58937

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Alexander Kashlinsky is an astronomer and cosmologist working at NASA Goddard-Space-Flight-Center, known for work on dark flow and the cosmic infrared background. Kashlinsky has been interviewed by Morgan Freeman in season 2 of Through the Wormhole.

#1842

Herbert Gursky

#48538

Overall Influence

1930 - 2006 (76 years)

Herbert Gursky was the Superintendent of the Naval Research Laboratory's Space Science Division and Chief Scientist of the E.O. Hulburt Center for Space Research. Biography Gursky's research activities have concentrated in the area of X-ray astronomy. He has published more than 100 articles in this area and has edited two books on the subject. He was the Principal Investigator for NASA sponsored space programs on the Astronomical Netherlands Satellite and the 1st High Energy Astrophysics Observatory satellite and a co-investigator on numerous other rocket and satellite experiments. In addit...

#1843

Sebastian von Hoerner

#25909

Overall Influence

1919 - 2003 (84 years)

Sebastian Rudolf Karl von Hoerner was a German astrophysicist and radio astronomer. He was born in Görlitz, Lower Silesia. During WW II, Von Hoerner served in the German Army on the Eastern Front. A bullet struck a pair of binoculars he was wearing on a strap around his neck, ricocheted up and blinded him in one eye. He was sent to Germany to recover and was there when the Front collapsed. After the end of World War II he studied physics at University of Göttingen. He obtained his doctorate at the same university in 1951 as Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Together they conducted simulations that studied the formation of stars and globular clusters.

#1844

Mikhail Dyakonov

#10916

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Mikhail Dyakonov is a Russian professor of physics at Laboratoire Charles Coulomb , Université Montpellier - CNRS in France. Career His name is connected with several physical phenomena: Dyakonov–Perel spin relaxation mechanism, Dyakonov–Shur plasma wave instability. In 1971, together with V.I. Perel he predicted the Spin Hall Effect, which has become a field of intense studies.

#1845

Bert J. Sakmann

#67376

Overall Influence

#1846

Alessandro Strumia

#54220

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Alessandro Strumia is an Italian physicist at the University of Pisa. His research focuses on high energy physics, beyond the Standard Model, studying the flavour of elementary particle, charge conjugation parity symmetry violations, and the Higgs boson. In September 2018, Strumia gave a controversial presentation at CERN's first Workshop on High Energy Theory and Gender, where he claimed that male, not female scientists, were the victims of discrimination on the part of universities.

#1847

Donald E. Brownlee

#30657

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Donald Eugene Brownlee is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington at Seattle and the principal investigator for NASA's Stardust mission. In 2000, along with his co-author Peter Ward, he co-originated the term Rare Earth, in reference to the possible scarcity of life elsewhere in the universe. His primary research interests include astrobiology, comets, and cosmic dust. He was born in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#1848

Alexander Fetter

#42429

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Alexander L. Fetter is an American physicist and Professor Emeritus of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University in California. His research interests include theoretical condensed matter and superconductivity.

#1849

Kazys Almenas

#53817

Overall Influence

1935 - 2017 (82 years)

Kazys Almenas was a Lithuanian physicist, writer, essayist, and publisher. Biography Kazys Almenas was born in Gruzdžiai, Šiauliai County, Lithuania. He attended the University of Nebraska and Northwestern University. Between 1965 and 1967, he studied at the University of Warsaw and received a doctorate in physics. Almenas was teaching at the University of Maryland.

#1850

Hans-Jürgen Treder

Hans-Jürgen Treder

#39991

Overall Influence

1928 - 2006 (78 years)

Hans-Jürgen Treder was a German theoretical physicist and in the GDR, specializing in general relativity , astrophysics, and cosmology. He also had an interest in the history of science and philosophy.

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