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.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#1901

Douglas James Scalapino

#68098

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Douglas James Scalapino is an American physicist noted for his contribution to theoretical condensed matter physics. Career Scalapino completed his undergraduate degree at Yale in 1955, and his PhD at Stanford in 1961. He then followed Ed Jaynes to become a research associate at Washington University in St. Louis from 1961-1962 and then moved to University of Pennsylvania where he attained the rank of full professor in 1969. He is currently a Research Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

#1902

Jan Ambjørn

#65042

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jan Ambjørn is a Danish theoretical physicist. He received his PhD in 1980 at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, followed by postdoctoral research positions at Caltech and Nordita. He has been employed at the Niels Bohr Institute from 1986, since 1992 as professor in theoretical physics. From 2003 to 2010 he was also a professor at Utrecht University, and since 2012 he has been a professor at Radboud University, both in the Netherlands.

#1903

Laird A. Thompson

#52949

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Laird A. Thompson , is a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Thompson graduated with a B.A. in both physics and astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1974. He is professionally associated with the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the International Society for Optical Engineering, and has served as an adjunct member of the Center for Adaptive Optics.

#1904

Michael Woolfson

#28868

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Michael Mark Woolfson was a British physicist and planetary scientist. His research interests were in the fields of x-ray crystallography, biophysics, colour vision and the formation of stars and planets.

#1905

Jack Michael Guralnik

#69059

Overall Influence

#1906

Pedro G. Ferreira

#56098

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Pedro Gil Ferreira is a Portuguese astrophysicist and author. As of 2016 he is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Wolfson College. Education and early life Ferreira was born in Lisbon, Portugal, and attended the Technical University of Lisbon, where he studied engineering from 1986–1991. While there, he taught himself general relativity. He studied for a PhD in theoretical physics at Imperial College London, supervised by Andy Albrecht.

#1907

Leonid Sedov

#18819

Overall Influence

1907 - 1999 (92 years)

Leonid Ivanovich Sedov was a Russian physicist who worked as an engineer in the former Soviet space program. In 1930 Sedov graduated from the Moscow State University, where he had been a student of Sergey Chaplygin, with the degree of Doctor of Physics and Mathematical Sciences. He later became a professor at the university.

#1908

James Westphal

#40064

Overall Influence

1930 - 2004 (74 years)

James Adolph Westphal was an American academic, scientist, engineer, inventor and astronomer and Director of Caltech's Palomar Observatory from 1994 through 1997. His participation played an important role in designing the main camera for the Hubble Space Telescope.

#1909

Gabriel Kotliar

#45718

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Gabriel Kotliar is a physicist at Rutgers University in the United States, where he is Board of Governors Professor of Physics. Early life Kotliar was born in Argentina. He studied in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, where he received a B.Sc. degree in Physics and Mathematics in 1979, followed by an M.Sc. in Physics under the tutelage of Daniel Amit in 1980. He then moved to Princeton University, where he received his PhD in Physics in 1983 while working with Prof. Philip Warren Anderson.

#1910

Michiel van der Klis

Michiel van der Klis

#63158

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Michiel Baldur Maximiliaan van der Klis is a Dutch astronomer best known for his work on extreme 'pairings' of stars called X-ray binaries, more particularly his explanation of the occurrence of quasi-periodic oscillations in these systems and his co-discovery of the first millisecond X-ray pulsar. In the 1980s he gained worldwide fame with his investigation of QPOs. His revolutionary discoveries have had an enormous impact in his field of research; in effect, they have made it what it is today. Van der Klis pioneered special mathematical analysis techniques that are now regarded as the “gol...

#1911

Nir Shaviv

#34757

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Nir Joseph Shaviv is an Israeli‐American physics professor. He is professor at the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his solar and cosmic-ray hypothesis of climate change which disagrees with the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. In 2002, Shaviv hypothesised that passages through the Milky Way's spiral arms appear to have been the cause behind the major ice-ages over the past billion years. In his later work, co-authored by Jan Veizer, a low upper limit was placed on the climatic effect of .

#1912

John Marburger

#26274

Overall Influence

1941 - 2011 (70 years)

John Harmen "Jack" Marburger III was an American physicist who directed the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the administration of President George W. Bush, serving as the Science Advisor to the President. His tenure was marred by controversy regarding his defense of the administration against allegations from over two dozen Nobel Laureates, amongst others, that scientific evidence was being suppressed or ignored in policy decisions, including those relating to stem cell research and global warming. However, he has also been credited with keeping the political effects of the Septemb...

#1913

Jane S. Richardson

Jane S. Richardson

#15912

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Jane Shelby Richardson is an American biophysicist best known for developing the Richardson diagram, or ribbon diagram, a method of representing the 3D structure of proteins. Ribbon diagrams have become a standard representation of protein structures that has facilitated further investigation of protein structure and function globally. With interests in astronomy, math, physics, botany, and philosophy, Richardson took an unconventional route to establishing a science career. Today Richardson is a professor in biochemistry at Duke University.

#1914

Enrico. Clementi

#69330

Overall Influence

#1915

Monique Combescure

#32089

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Monique Combescure , is a French physicist specializing in mathematical physics. In 2001, she became director of research at the Lyon Institute of Nuclear Physics. From 2000 to 2008, she was director of the European Mathematics and Quantum Physics Research Group which aims to promote synergy between theoretical physicists and mathematicians in the field of quantum physics. She received the Irène-Joliot-Curie Prize in 2007 and the rank of Officer of the National Order of Merit in 2011.

#1916

Amnon Aharony

#48637

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Amnon Aharony is an Israeli Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, Israel and in the Physics Department of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. After years of research on statistical physics , his current research focuses on condensed matter theory, especially in mesoscopic physics and spintronics. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of several other academies. He also received several prizes, including the Rothschild Prize in Physical Sc...

#1917

Benjamin Abeles

#31207

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Benjamin Abeles was an Austrian-Czech physicist whose research in the 1960s in the US on germanium–silicon alloys led to the technology used to power space probes such as the Voyager spacecraft. He grew up in Austria and Czechoslovakia and arrived in the UK in 1939 on one of the Kindertransport missions. He completed his education after the war in Czechoslovakia and Israel , obtaining a doctorate in physics. He then lived and worked as a research physicist in the US and retired in 1995. His honours include the 1979 Stuart Ballantine Medal and his induction into the New Jersey Inventors Hall o...

#1918

Mujahid Kamran

#15649

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Syed Mujahid Kamran is a Pakistani theoretical physicist and a former vice-chancellor of the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. He is a professor of Physics and previously served as the chairman of the Physics Department at the University of the Punjab and . From 2004–2007, he served as the dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the same institution. In January 2008, he was appointed as vice-chancellor of the Punjab University by the Governor of Punjab, Lieutenant General Khalid Maqbool, on the recommendation of a search committee.

#1919

Bernard Cohen

#33016

Overall Influence

1924 - 2012 (88 years)

Bernard Leonard Cohen was born in Pittsburgh, and was Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Cohen was a staunch opponent of the so-called Linear no-threshold model which postulates there exists no safe threshold for radiation exposure. His view which has support from a minority. He died in March 2012.

#1920

Akira Arimura

#30356

Overall Influence

1923 - 2007 (84 years)

was a professor of medicine at Tulane University, and the founding Director of the university's Hébert Research Center, working on neuroendocrinology and biochemistry research. He died in 2007 of multiple myeloma. His books have been collected by libraries worldwide.

#1921

Sune Toft

#55473

Overall Influence

Sune Toft is a professor of Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics at the Niels Bohr Institute. His research focuses on understanding the cosmic origin and evolution of galaxies. Early education Sune Toft was educated through the Danish education system, earning his bachelor's degree in physics in 1998 at the University of Copenhagen, and his master's degree in 2000, and his PhD with a thesis titled High Redshift Clusters of Galaxies in 2003, both from the Niels Bohr Institute, under the supervision of Jens Hjorth.

#1922

Natalie Batalha

Natalie Batalha

#56077

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Natalie M. Batalha is professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. Previously she was a research astronomer in the Space Sciences Division of NASA Ames Research Center and held the position of Co-Investigator and Kepler Mission Scientist on the Kepler Mission, the first mission capable of finding Earth-size planets around other stars.

#1923

Paul Söding

#68983

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Paul Heinrich Söding is a German physicist. He is best known for his work in particle physics and as former director of research of the German particle physics lab DESY. Career Paul Söding studied physics at the universities of Hamburg and Munich in Germany. He was the first doctoral student of Willibald Jentschke in Hamburg. In 1964 he received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg. He subsequently did research at the University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University in New York and the European particle physics research lab CERN.

#1924

Beverly Berger

#17197

Overall Influence

Beverly K. Berger is an American physicist known for her work on gravitational physics, especially gravitational waves, gravitons, and gravitational singularities. Alongside Berger's more serious physics research, she is also known for noticing that vibrational patterns caused by local ravens were interfering with observations at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

#1925

Albert Baez

#21652

Overall Influence

1912 - 2007 (95 years)

Albert Vinicio Báez was a Mexican-American physicist and the father of singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña, and an uncle of John C. Baez. He made important contributions to the early development of X-ray microscopes, X-ray optics, and later X-ray telescopes.

#1926

Ataç İmamoğlu

#14128

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Ataç İmamoğlu is a Turkish-Swiss physicist working on quantum optics and quantum computation. His academic interests are quantum optics, semiconductor physics, and nonlinear optics. Education İmamoğlu graduated from TED Ankara College in 1981. He received his BSc in electrical engineering at the Middle East Technical University, and his Ph.D. from Stanford for his work on Electromagnetically Induced Transparency and Lasers without Inversion. He did post-doctoral work on atomic and molecular physics at Harvard.

#1927

Frances Spence

#5009

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

Frances V. Spence was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC . She is considered one of the first computer programmers in history. The other five ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Jean Bartik.

#1928

Roger Tayler

#47449

Overall Influence

1929 - 1997 (68 years)

Professor Roger John Tayler OBE FRS was a British astronomer. Tayler made important contributions to stellar structure and evolution, plasma stability, nucleogenesis and cosmology. He wrote a number of textbooks. He collaborated with Fred Hoyle and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge on problems of helium production in cosmology.

#1929

Danielle Bassett

#19014

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Dani Smith Bassett is an American physicist and systems neuroscientist who was the youngest individual to be awarded a 2014 MacArthur fellowship. Bassett, whose pronouns are they/them, was also awarded a 2014 Sloan fellowship. They are currently the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Their work focuses on applying network science to the study of learning in the human brain in addition to the stu...

#1930

Anthony William Thomas

#55633

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Anthony William Thomas is an Australian physicist, Professor of Physics at the University of Adelaide since 1984 and Elder Professor of Physics since 1990. Thomas was born in Adelaide and educated at Adelaide Boys High School where he won the Thomas Price Scholarship in 1966. He was awarded the BHP Medal in 1967 as the top student in South Australia in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry in the Matriculation Examinations. He completed a Ph.D. at Flinders University in 1973.

#1931

Abbas Anvari

#30512

Overall Influence

Abbas Anvari is an Iranian Professor in Physics. He has a Ph.D. in physics from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. He served as the chancellor of Sharif University of Technology for two terms: 1980–1982 and 1985–1989.

#1932

Morikazu Toda

#24701

Overall Influence

1917 - 2010 (93 years)

Morikazu Toda was a Japanese physicist, best known for the discovery of the Toda lattice. His main interests were in statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. Career After graduating from the Department of Physics, Tokyo University he became associate professor first at Keijo University and then at the Tokyo University of Education . In 1952 he was promoted professor and held subsequent positions at Chiba University, Yokohama National University, and University of the Air. In addition, he had visiting positions at São Paulo University and Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

#1933

Eva Grebel

#66843

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Eva K. Grebel is a German astronomer. Since 2007 she has been co-director of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Eva Grebel is an expert in the study of stellar populations and galaxy formation.

#1934

Fritz Rohrlich

#48897

Overall Influence

1921 - 2018 (97 years)

Fritz Rohrlich was an American theoretical physicist and educator who published in the fields of quantum electrodynamics, classical electrodynamics of charged particles, and the philosophy of science.

#1935

Stewart Sharpless

#66970

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Stewart Sharpless was an American astronomer who carried out fundamental work on the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. As a graduate student at Yerkes Observatory he worked under William Morgan with fellow graduate student Don Osterbrock. He helped Harold Johnson and Morgan with calculations used to help define the UBV photometric system. In 1952, Sharpless and Osterbrock published their observations that demonstrated the spiral structure of the Milky Way by estimating the distances to H II regions and young hot stars. For a while Sharpless was at Mount Wilson Observatory where he worked on...

#1936

M. J. Seaton

#45202

Overall Influence

1923 - 2007 (84 years)

Michael John Seaton was an influential British mathematician, atomic physicist, and astronomer. He was born in Bristol, and educated at Wallington County Grammar School , a grammar school in Surrey, where he won prizes for his achievements in chemistry.

#1937

Herch Moysés Nussenzveig

Herch Moysés Nussenzveig

#24345

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Herch Moysés Nussenzveig was a Brazilian physicist, professor at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He authored several textbooks, notably the collection Curso de Física Básica , winner of the Prêmio Jabuti in 1999 on the category Ciências Exatas, Tecnologia e Informática . He was president of the Brazilian Physical Society from 1981 to 1983.

#1938

R. Stephen Berry

#6639

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Richard Stephen Berry was an American professor of physical chemistry. He was the James Franck Distinguished Service Professor, emeritus,, at The University of Chicago. He was also special advisor for national security to the director, at Argonne National Laboratory.

#1939

Len Fisher

#21218

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Leonard Ross Fisher is an Australian physicist, and visiting senior research fellow at the University of Bristol, UK. He is known for his research into everyday topics, such as the optimal way to dunk a biscuit, and the optimum use of cheese in a cheese sandwich.

#1940

Robert J. Kolenkow

#36418

Overall Influence

Robert J. Kolenkow is an American physicist and teacher. He is best known for being the coauthor, along with Daniel Kleppner, of a popular undergraduate physics textbook. Kolenkow did his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 1955. For a time, he was an associate professor of physics at MIT. His departure in 1971 generated some controversy on campus; he was regarded as an excellent teacher by his students, however, the administration was viewed as being more concerned about research than education when making its tenure decisions.

#1941

Chiara Marletto

#42100

Overall Influence

Chiara Marletto is a theoretical physicist at Wolfson College, Oxford. She is a pioneer in the field of constructor theory, couterfactuals and a generalization of the quantum theory of information. Life Marletto grew up in Turin. She graduated from the Polytechnic University of Torino, and the University of Oxford, where she studied with Artur Ekert.

#1942

A F M Yusuf Haider

A F M Yusuf Haider

#62633

Overall Influence

A F M Yusuf Haider is a Bangladeshi academic and scientist. Haider was appointed as the pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Dhaka for 6 years. He served as the 25th vice-chancellor of the university from 1 August 2002 until 23 September 2002.

#1943

Jan Smit

#40923

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Jan Smit is a Dutch theoretical physicist. During his PhD at UCLA with professor Robert Finkelstein he made some early contributions to lattice formulation of quantum field theory around 1972, which was a year before Kenneth Wilson, and two years before Alexander Polyakov. However, he encountered some problems with fermion doubling which he could not solve at the moment. At that time he did not realize the value of his work and he only mentioned it briefly in his Ph.D. thesis in 1974, which was about Schwinger source theory. A few years later he returned to working on the lattice formulation ...

#1944

Leonard Eisenbud

#25907

Overall Influence

1913 - 2004 (91 years)

Leonard Eisenbud was an American theoretical physicist. Eisenbud earned his bachelor's degree at Union College in Schenectady, New York in 1935. He spent the year 1940/1941 at the Institute for Advanced Study. During World War II he worked on radar at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. After the war, he earned his doctorate at Princeton University in 1948 under Eugene Wigner.

#1945

Hans Mark

#4160

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Hans Michael Mark was a German-born American government official who served as Secretary of the Air Force and as a Deputy Administrator of NASA. He was an expert and consultant in aerospace design and national defense policy.

#1946

Nándor Balázs

#36608

Overall Influence

1926 - 2003 (77 years)

Nándor Balázs was a Hungarian-American physicist, external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . Early life and education Balázs attended to the Rácz private primary school and was a classmate of Janos Kemeny. Nándor Balázs received a master's degree at the University of Budapest . Balázs left communist Hungary in 1949. He received a PhD at the University of Amsterdam .

#1947

Wendy Taylor

#47273

Overall Influence

Wendy Taylor is an Experimental Particle Physicist at York University and a former Canada Research Chair. She is the lead for York University's ATLAS experiment group at CERN. Education Taylor graduated from the University of British Columbia with Bachelors of Science in Physics in 1991. As an undergraduate, she worked at TRIUMF, working on rare kaon decay. She completed her graduate studies at the University of Toronto, where she earned a PhD under the supervision of Pekka Sinervo in 1999. She worked on fragmentation properties of the bottom quark. She worked at Stony Brook University as a postdoctoral fellow.

#1948

Donald Barr

#24528

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Donald Barr was an American educator, writer, and Office of Strategic Services officer. He was an administrator at Columbia University before serving as headmaster at the Dalton School in New York City and the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York. He also wrote two science fiction novels. His sons are former United States Attorney General William Barr and physicist Stephen Barr.

#1949

Albert J. Libchaber

#9687

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Albert Joseph Libchaber is a Detlev W. Bronk Professor at The Rockefeller University. He won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1986. In 1999 he received the Prix des Trois Physiciens from the Fondation de France.

#1950

Manfred Börner

#27827

Overall Influence

1929 - 1996 (67 years)

Manfred Börner was a German physicist he holds nearly 60 patents and is best known for his contributions to the development of fibre optic technology. He developed the first working optical fibre data transmission system in 1965.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions