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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,

#2101

Donald Marolf

#55654

Overall Influence

Donald Michael Marolf is a theoretical physicist, a professor of physics, and former head of the physics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography Marolf gained his Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin in 1992, under Bryce DeWitt with a thesis on Green's Bracket Algebras and Their Quantization. His undergraduate-degree is from William Jewell College, in 1987.

#2102

Herbert Wilson

#17387

Overall Influence

1929 - 2008 (79 years)

Herbert Rees Wilson FRSE was a physicist, who was one of the team who worked on the structure of DNA at King's College London, under the direction of Sir John Randall. Biography Early life He was born the son of a sea captain at Nefyn on the Llŷn Peninsula and educated at Nefyn school and Pwllheli Grammar School. He entered Bangor University, where he gained a first class honours degree in physics in 1949 and a PhD in 1952 under the supervision of professor Edwin Owen.

#2103

Peter Hänggi

#53369

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Peter Hänggi is a theoretical physicist from Switzerland, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Augsburg. He is best known for his original works on Brownian motion and the Brownian motor concept, stochastic resonance and dissipative systems . Other topics include, driven quantum tunneling, such as the discovery of coherent destruction of tunneling , phononics, relativistic statistical mechanics and the foundations of classical and quantum thermodynamics.

#2104

Anthony Aveni

#26199

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Anthony Francis Aveni is an American academic anthropologist, astronomer, and author, noted in particular for his extensive publications and contributions to the field of archaeoastronomy. With an academic career spanning over four decades, Aveni is recognized for his influence on the development of archaeoastronomy as a discipline in the latter 20th century. He has specialized in the study of ancient astronomical practices in the Americas, and is one of the founders of research into the historical astronomy of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. He held an endowed chair as the Russell Colga...

#2105

Gary Feldman

#52723

Overall Influence

Gary J. Feldman is an American particle physicist who works on neutrino physics with the NOvA experiment based at Fermilab. Early life and education Feldman was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming and was raised in South Bend, Indiana. His father immigrated from Poland to the United States as a child shortly after World War I. Feldman's father attended college at the City University of New York and received his medical training at the University of Basel.

#2106

Lyudmila Karachkina

#33324

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina is an astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. In 1978 she began as a staff astronomer of the Institute for Theoretical Astronomy at Leningrad. Her research at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory then focused on astrometry and photometry of minor planets. The Minor Planet Center credits her with the discovery of 130 minor planets, including the Amor asteroid 5324 Lyapunov and the Trojan asteroid 3063 Makhaon. In 2004, she received a Ph.D. in astronomy from Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University.

#2107

Sheperd S. Doeleman

#52874

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Sheperd "Shep" S. Doeleman is an American astrophysicist. His research focuses on super massive black holes with sufficient resolution to directly observe the event horizon. He is a senior research fellow at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian and the Founding Director of the Event Horizon Telescope project. He led the international team of researchers that produced the first directly observed image of a black hole.

#2108

Jisoon Ihm

#48059

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jisoon Ihm is a South Korean physicist and Distinguished Professor in Department of Physics at Pohang University of Science and Technology in Pohang, South Korea. Education B.S. in Physics at Seoul National UniversityM.A. in Physics at University of California at BerkeleyPh.D. in Physics at University of California at Berkeley

#2109

John R. Taylor

#50777

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Robert Taylor is British-born emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his B.A. in mathematics at Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963 with thesis advisor Geoffrey Chew. Taylor has written several college-level physics textbooks. His bestselling book is An Introduction to Error Analysis, which has been translated into nine languages. His intermediate-level undergraduate textbook, Classical Mechanics, was well-reviewed.

#2110

Carole Jordan

#47119

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Dame Carole Jordan, , is a British physicist, astrophysicist, astronomer and academic. Currently, she is Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. From 1994 to 1996, she was President of the Royal Astronomical Society; she was the first woman to hold this appointment. She won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2005; she was only the third female recipient following Caroline Herschel in 1828 and Vera Rubin in 1996. She was head of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxfor...

#2111

Kalbe Razi Naqvi

#30390

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Kalbe Razi Naqvi is a British Pakistani-Norwegian physicist, who has been ordinarily resident in Norway since 1977, working as a professor of biophysics in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He retired at the end of June 2014, and is now a Prof. Emeritus in NTNU.

#2112

Benjamin Schumacher

#13905

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Benjamin "Ben" Schumacher is an American theoretical physicist, working mostly in the field of quantum information theory. He discovered a way of interpreting quantum states as information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information in a smaller number of states. This is now known as Schumacher compression. This was the quantum analog of Shannon's noiseless coding theorem, and it helped to start the field known as quantum information theory.

#2113

Peter Jenniskens

Peter Jenniskens

#36272

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Petrus Matheus Marie Jenniskens is a Dutch-American astronomer and a senior research scientist at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and at NASA Ames Research Center. He is an expert on meteor showers, and wrote the book Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets, published in 2006 and Atlas of Earth’s Meteor Showers, published in 2023. He is past president of Commission 22 of the International Astronomical Union and was chair of the Working Group on Meteor Shower Nomenclature after it was first established. Asteroid 42981 Jenniskens is named in his honor.

#2114

Laurens W. Molenkamp

Laurens W. Molenkamp

#42936

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Laurens W. Molenkamp is a professor of physics and Chair of Experimental Physics at the University of Würzburg. He is known for his work on semiconductor structures and topological insulators. Biography Laurens W. Molenkamp is an experimental condensed matter physicist. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Groningen, and spent several years first with Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven and then as Associate Professor at the RWTH in Aachen. He came to the University of Würzburg in 1999 and is now the Chair of Experimental Physics III and leads the II-VI MBE unit.

#2115

Jan Tauc

#54335

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Jan Tauc was a Czech-American physicist who introduced the concepts of Tauc gap and Tauc plot to the optical characterization of solids. Born in Bohemia, he emigrated to the United States in 1969, where he received citizenship in 1978, and worked for the rest of his life.

#2116

Arvind Rajaraman

#23604

Overall Influence

Arvind Rajaraman is an Indian-born theoretical physicist and string theorist. Rajaraman earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is an associate professor at University of California, Irvine. The first time that India received any medals in International Mathematics Olympiad was in 1989, when four among six Indian participants received a bronze medal. Rajaraman was one of these four bronze medal winning participants. Rajaraman was also part of the UC Irvine team whose research contributed to the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics.

#2117

Myron Ben Salamon

#74004

Overall Influence

#2118

Ratko Janev

#71691

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

Ratko Janev was a Yugoslav and Serbian atomic physicist and Macedonian academician. Biography Janev was born on March 30, 1939, in Sveti Vrach, Bulgaria. During his youth he moved to Yugoslavia, where he graduated from a high school in Skopje in 1957 and then went on to study at the University of Belgrade, where he received a PhD degree in 1968. From 1965 he was an associate of the Vinča Nuclear Institute. From 1986 he was Head of the Atomic and Molecular Unit in the Nuclear Data Section of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

#2119

Lowell S. Brown

#61956

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Lowell S. Brown was an American theoretical physicist, a retired Staff Scientist and Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Professor Emeritus of physics at University of Washington. He was a student of Julian Schwinger at Harvard University and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Brown authored a book on Quantum Field Theory that has received over 5,000 citations, and he has authored or co-authored over 150 articles that have accumulated over 11,000 citations.

#2120

Arie Andries Kruithof

#38266

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

Arie Andries Kruithof was a Dutch professor of applied physics at Eindhoven University of Technology . Kruithof studied physics at Utrecht University, where he obtained a doctor’s degree from Leonard Ornstein in 1934. At Philips, he did research on lighting systems, especially gas-discharge lamps. Later he was appointed professor of applied physics at Eindhoven University of Technology, leading the Atomic Physics group, mainly researching gas discharges and plasmass. The Kruithof curve, describing the influence of colour temperature on visual perception, is named after him.

#2121

Jan Terlouw

#41160

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Jan Cornelis Terlouw is a retired Dutch politician, physicist and author. A member of the Democrats 66 party, he served as Deputy Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1981 to 1982 under Prime Minister Dries van Agt.

#2122

Katrin Suder

#12287

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Katrin Suder is a German physicist and management consultant who served as State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Defense in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2014 to 2018. Early life and education Suder was born in Mainz on 29 September 1971. She studied physics at RWTH Aachen. In 2000, she received her doctorate in neuroinformatics at the Ruhr University Bochum. Suder also received a bachelor's degree in theater and linguistics there. She was a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation.

#2123

Michael J. Kurtz

#64690

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Michael J. Kurtz is an astrophysicist at Harvard University, He has held the title of Astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian since 1983, and the additional post of Computer Scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory since 1984. He is especially known both for his research into the distribution of galaxies, and for his creation of the Astrophysics Data System.

#2124

Alfred Saupe

#32875

Overall Influence

1925 - 2008 (83 years)

Alfred Saupe was a German Physicist born in Badenweiler, who laid groundbreaking work in the area of liquid crystal studies. Biography Saupe, son of a hotelier, attended elementary school in Badenweiler and high school in the neighboring town of Müllheim. In 1943, during his senior year, he was drafted into the army during World War II; later, he served in the Luftwaffe, and finally trained as a paratrooper. In January 1945, he was captured in the Netherlands and became a POW in England. After he was freed in 1948, he completed his high school education in 1949 at the Freiburg Berthold-Gymnas...

#2125

Xiaoxing Xi

#38816

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Xiaoxing Xi is a Chinese-born American physicist. He is the Laura H. Carnell Professor and former chair at the Physics Department of Temple University in Philadelphia. In May 2015, the United States Department of Justice arrested him on charges of having sent restricted American technology to China. All charges against him were dropped in September 2015.

#2126

Daniel Gillespie

#50057

Overall Influence

1938 - 2017 (79 years)

Daniel Thomas Gillespie was a physicist who is best known for his derivation in 1976 of the stochastic simulation algorithm , also called the Gillespie algorithm. Gillespie's broader research has produced articles on cloud physics, random variable theory, Brownian motion, Markov process theory, electrical noise, light scattering in aerosols, and quantum mechanics.

#2127

Alec Stokes

#37880

Overall Influence

1919 - 2003 (84 years)

Alexander Rawson Stokes was a British physicist at Royal Holloway College, London and later at King's College London. He was most recognised as a co-author of the second of the three papers published sequentially in Nature on 25 April 1953 describing the correct molecular structure of DNA. The first was authored by Francis Crick and James Watson, and the third by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling.

#2128

Klaus Kern

#32548

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Klaus Kern is a German physical chemist. Kern received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2008. Biography Kern studied at the University of Bonn chemistry and physics, and received his Ph.D. in 1986.

#2129

Heidi Hammel

#42190

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Heidi B. Hammel is a planetary astronomer who has extensively studied Neptune and Uranus. She was part of the team imaging Neptune from Voyager 2 in 1989. She led the team using the Hubble Space Telescope to view Shoemaker-Levy 9's impact with Jupiter in 1994. She has used the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Telescope to study Uranus and Neptune, discovering new information about dark spots, planetary storms and Uranus' rings. In 2002, she was selected as an interdisciplinary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope.

#2130

Trilochan Pradhan

#37510

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Trilochan Pradhan was an Indian scientist. Career Pradhan obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1956. He headed the Theoretical Nuclear Physics Division at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics from 1964 to 1974, was the founding director of the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar from 1974 to 1989 and served as the vice chancellor of Utkal University from 1989 to 1991.

#2131

Emiko Hiyama

#68958

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Emiko Hiyama is a Japanese computational nuclear physicist whose research concerns computational methods for few-body systems of nucleons. She is the director of the Strangeness Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, and a professor of physics at Tohoku University.

#2132

Andrew Ingersoll

Andrew Ingersoll

#42852

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Andrew Perry Ingersoll is a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology. Ingersoll was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. He received the lifetime achievement award in planetary science, the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize, in 2007. He proposed the runaway greenhouse effect and is known for his research on planetary atmospheres and climate.

#2133

C. V. Vishveshwara

#52284

Overall Influence

1938 - 2017 (79 years)

C.V.Vishveshwara was an Indian scientist and black hole physicist. Specializing in Einstein's General Relativity, he worked extensively on the theory of black holes and made major contributions to this field of research since its very beginning. He is popularly known as the 'black hole man of India'.

#2134

Michael John Seaton

#74407

Overall Influence

#2135

Max Dresden

#48936

Overall Influence

1918 - 1997 (79 years)

Max Dresden was a Dutch-American theoretical physicist and historian of physics. He is known for his research in "statistical mechanics, superconductivity, quantum field theory, and elementary particle physics."

#2136

Jane Greaves

#28390

Overall Influence

Jane Greaves is a Professor of Astronomy based at Cardiff University. While at the University of St Andrews she led the team which discovered a protoplanet within the protoplanetary disk around the young star HL Tauri.

#2137

Laurie Brown

#58504

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (101 years)

Laurie Mark Brown is an American theoretical physicist and historian of quantum field theory and elementary particle physics. Biography Brown studied at Cornell University, where in 1951 he received his Ph.D. under Richard Feynman. Since 1950 he has been on the faculty of the physics department of Northwestern University, where he became a tenured professor and eventually retired as professor emeritus. For the academic year 1952–1953 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. For the academic years 1958–1959 and 1959–1960 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Italy. In 1966 he was an IEA professor at the University of Vienna.

#2138

Thomas H. Stix

#51334

Overall Influence

1924 - 2001 (77 years)

Thomas Howard Stix was an American physicist. Stix performed seminal work in plasma physics and wrote the first mathematical treatment of the field in 1962's The Theory of Plasma Waves. History Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 12, 1924, Stix grew up near Washington University. The Stix family owned Rice-Stix Inc., a dry goods firm that was among the city's largest businesses at the turn of the 20th century. It continued operations until the 1950s. His family home on Forsyth Boulevard was eventually donated to Washington University and is now the Stix International House.

#2139

Yvette Cauchois

#21759

Overall Influence

1908 - 1999 (91 years)

Yvette Cauchois was a French physicist known for her contributions to x-ray spectroscopy and x-ray optics, and for pioneering European synchrotron research. Education Cauchois attended school in Paris, and pursued undergraduate studies at the Sorbonne who awarded her a degree in the physical sciences in July 1928. Cauchois undertook graduate studies at the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry with the support of a National Fund for Science studentship, and was awarded her doctorate in 1933 for her work on the use of curved crystals for high-resolution x-ray analysis.

#2140

Charles L. Brooks III

#19416

Overall Influence

Charles L. Brooks III is an American theoretical and computational biophysicist. He is the Cyrus Levinthal Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry and Biophysics, the Warner-Lambert/Park-Davis Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Biophysics and Chair of Biophysics at the University of Michigan.

#2141

Otto Kratky

#26388

Overall Influence

1902 - 1995 (93 years)

Otto Kratky was an Austrian physicist. He is best known for his contribution to the small-angle X-ray scattering method, for the Kratky plot, and for the invention of the density metering using the oscillating u-tube principle. The worm-like chain model in polymer physics, introduced with Günther Porod in a 1949 paper, is also named the Kratky–Porod model.

#2142

Gerald Mahan

#54706

Overall Influence

1937 - 2021 (84 years)

Gerald Dennis Mahan was an American condensed matter physicist, with specific research interests in transport and optical properties of materials, and solid-state devices. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society.

#2143

Herschel Rabitz

#54742

Overall Influence

Herschel Albert Rabitz is a professor of chemistry at Princeton University who does both theoretical and experimental research. As of September 2022 he has an h-index of 99, an i-10 index of nearly 700, and nearly 50000 citations. He completed his PhD in chemical physics at Harvard University in 1970. He completed post-doctorate work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his bachelor's degree from University of California, Berkeley.

#2144

John Freely

#6163

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

John Freely was an American physicist, teacher, and author of popular travel and history books on Istanbul, Athens, Venice, Turkey, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. He was the father of writer and Turko-English literary translator Maureen Freely.

#2145

Costas Soukoulis

Costas Soukoulis

#32928

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Costas M. Soukoulis is a Senior Scientist in the Ames Laboratory and a Distinguished Professor of Physics Emeritus at Iowa State University. He received his B.Sc. from University of Athens in 1974. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1978, under the supervision of Kathryn Liebermann Levin. From 1978 to 1981 he was at the Physics Department at University of Virginia. He spent three years at Exxon Research and Engineering Co. and since 1984 has been at Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory. He has been part-time Professor at the Department of Materials Scien...

#2146

Pascal Lee

#32767

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Pascal Lee is co-founder and chairman of the Mars Institute, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, and the Principal Investigator of the Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He holds an ME in geology and geophysics from the University of Paris, and a PhD in astronomy and space sciences from Cornell University.

#2147

Vahe Gurzadyan

#55791

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Vahagn "Vahe" Gurzadyan is an Armenian mathematical physicist and a professor and head of Cosmology Center at Yerevan Physics Institute, Yerevan , Armenia, best known for co-writing "Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity" paper with his colleague, Roger Penrose, and collaborating on Roger Penrose's recent book Cycles of Time.

#2148

Daniela Calzetti

#72021

Overall Influence

Daniela Calzetti is an Italian-American astronomer known for her research on cosmic dust, star formation, and galaxy formation and evolution, and in particular for the Calzetti dust extinction law, an estimate for how much information about distant galaxies has been obscured by cosmic dust. She is a professor of astronomy and head of the astronomy department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and principal investigator of the Legacy ExtraGalactic Ultraviolet Survey project of the Hubble Space Telescope.

#2149

Reinhard F. Werner

#45024

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Reinhard F. Werner is a German physicist, and Professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Leibniz Universität Hannover. He is notable for his contributions to the field of quantum information theory such as foundational concepts in the theory of quantum correlations including the concept of separable quantum states and mixed entangled states now known as Werner state, finitely correlated states aka matrix product states, mean field theory and entanglement area laws.

#2150

Arnold Kosevich

#55912

Overall Influence

1928 - 2006 (78 years)

Arnold Markovych Kosevich was a Soviet and Ukrainian physicist, known for contributions to the electron theory of metals and the theory of crystals. Biography Arnold Kosevich was born in Tulchyn, Ukraine. He graduated from Kharkiv University in 1951, and received his PhD in 1954 under the supervision of Ilya Lifshitz. In 1954–1957 he worked at Chernivtsi University, in 1957–1974 at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology. In the years 1974–2003 he headed the department of theoretical physics at the Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering.

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