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).

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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#2151

Gerhard Abstreiter

#37162

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Gerhard Abstreiter is a German physicist and professor of physics at Technical University of Munich , currently holding the university's highest honor, the Emeritus of Excellence and also being a distinguished visiting professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. From 1987 to 2015, he was a full professor at TUM and also, in 2010 and 2011, a distinguished visiting professor at University of Tokyo. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and acatech.

#2152

Sergio Grinstein

#74948

Overall Influence

#2153

Lee Grodzins

#62432

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Lee Grodzins is an American professor emeritus of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . After work as a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Grodzins joined the faculty of MIT, where he taught physics for nearly four decades. He was also head of R&D for Niton Corporation, which developed devices to detect dangerous contaminants and contraband. He wrote more than 150 technical papers and holds more than 60 US patents.

#2154

Wallace L. W. Sargent

#48404

Overall Influence

1935 - 2012 (77 years)

Wallace Leslie William Sargent was a British-born American astronomer and the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy at California Institute of Technology. Education Sargent was born in Elsham, North Lincolnshire, the son of a gardener and a housecleaner, and grew up in Winterton, Lincolnshire. Sargent was the first person in his family to attend high school, and the first student from his high school to ever attend college. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Manchester in 1956, and his Ph.D. in 1959 from the same institution.

#2155

Ramin Golestanian

#38505

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Ramin Golestanian is a professor at the Department of Physics and the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at Oxford University. He is a fellow of St Cross College and is affiliated with the Oxford Centre for Soft and Biological Matter. In 2014 he was awarded the Fernand Holweck Medal and Prize for his "pioneering contributions to the field of active soft matter, particularly microscopic swimmers and active colloids". In 2017 he was awarded the Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Lecture Prize. Ramin Golestanian is now director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in G...

#2156

Rob Blokzijl

#41776

Overall Influence

1943 - 2015 (72 years)

Robert "Rob" Blokzijl was a Dutch physicist and computer scientist at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics , and an early internet pioneer. He was founding member and chairman of RIPE, the Réseaux IP Européens , the European Internet Registrar organisation.

#2157

Richard Edwin Hills

Richard Edwin Hills

#38697

Overall Influence

1945 - 2022 (77 years)

Richard Edwin Hills was a British astronomer who was emeritus professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. Education Born on 30 September 1945 and educated at Bedford School, Hills studied the Natural Science Tripos at Queens' College, Cambridge and then went to the University of California, Berkeley to complete his Doctor of Philosophy degree.

#2158

Yoshio Fujita

#60377

Overall Influence

1908 - 2013 (105 years)

Yoshio Fujita was a Japanese astronomer known for his contributions on spectroscopic observations of low temperature stars. He also served as president of the Japan Academy from April 1994 to April 2000.

#2159

Ignazio Licata

#39706

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Ignazio Licata, born 1958, is an Italian theoretical physicist, professor and scientific director of the Institute for Scientific Methodology, Italy. Education and work Licata has studied with David Bohm, Jean-Pierre Vigier, Abdus Salam and Giuseppe Arcidiacono.

#2160

Ladislas Goldstein

#58326

Overall Influence

1906 - 1994 (88 years)

Ladislas Goldstein was professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois and visiting professor of physics at the University of Paris-Orsay . He was born in Dombrád, Kingdom of Hungary.

#2161

Giampaolo Vettolani

#71605

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Giampaolo Vettolani is an Italian astrophysicist, scientific director of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome since 2012. Biography In 1973 he graduated with a distinction in physics from the University of Bologna upon the thesis The angular momentum of galaxies , supervised by Giancarlo Setti.

#2162

Shivaji Sondhi

#30056

Overall Influence

Shivaji Lal Sondhi is an Indian-born theoretical physicist who is currently the Wykeham Professor of Physics in the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford, known for contributions to the field of quantum condensed matter. He is son of former Lok Sabha MP Manohar Lal Sondhi.

#2163

Christopher Jarzynski

#48532

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Christopher Jarzynski is an American physicist and distinguished university professor at University of Maryland's department of chemistry and biochemistry, department of physics, and institute for physical science and technology, and fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He is known for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, for which he was awarded the 2019 Lars Onsager Prize. In 1997, he derived the now famous Jarzynski equality, confirmation of which was cited by the Nobel Committee for Physics as an application of one of the winning inventions ...

#2164

Janne Wallenius

#49236

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Janne Wallenius is a Swedish reactor physicist. He is a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Wallenius was born in 1968 in Trollhättan, Sweden. At the age of 18, he won the particle physics contest on the Swedish television show "Kvitt eller dubbelt" , after which he was nicknamed "partikel-Janne". He studied Engineering Physics at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg from 1987 to 1992. He got his PhD degree in Quantum Chemistry from Uppsala University in 1996.

#2165

David R. Morrison

#15320

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

David Robert Morrison is an American mathematician and theoretical physicist. He works on string theory and algebraic geometry, especially its relations to theoretical physics. Morrison studied at Princeton University with bachelor's degree in 1976 and at Harvard University with master's degree in 1977 and PhD under Phillip Griffiths in 1980 with thesis Semistable Degenerations of Enriques' and Hyperelliptic Surfaces. From 1980 he was an instructor and from 1982 an assistant professor at Princeton University and in the academic year 1984–1985 a visiting scientist at the University of Kyoto . ...

#2166

Peter Fratzl

#32058

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Peter Fratzl is an Austrian physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam. Life After studying in Strasbourg and Paris, and graduating as an engineer from the École polytechnique in 1980, Fratzl received his doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna . After that, he received his habilitation in the field of solid-state physics and worked as an assistant and associate professor at the Institute of Materials Physics at the University of Vienna . In addition to his role as director of the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces , Fratzl is also an external collaborator at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Osteology in Vienna .

#2167

Christoph von der Malsburg

Christoph von der Malsburg

#15693

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Christoph von der Malsburg is a German physicist and neuroscientist. Early life von der Malsburg obtained his PhD with a concentration in elementary particle physics at CERN and the University of Heidelberg in 1970.

#2168

James C. Hone

#75542

Overall Influence

#2169

Jerry Tersoff

#71097

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jerry Tersoff is a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. His work spans diverse topics in the theoretical understanding of surfaces, interfaces, electronic materials, epitaxial growth, and nanoscale devices. Throughout his career, his work has emphasized the use of simple models to understand complex behavior.

#2170

Jens Frahm

#23108

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jens Frahm is a German biophysicist and physicochemist. He is Research Group Leader of the Biomedical NMR group at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany . Early life and education From 1969 to 1974 Frahm studied physics at the University of Göttingen. His PhD thesis under the guidance of Hans Strehlow at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry was devoted to the use of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for a characterization of the molecular dynamics of hydrated ions in complex solutions. He received his PhD degree in 1977 in physical chemistry.

#2171

Roger Cowley

#51387

Overall Influence

1939 - 2015 (76 years)

Roger Arthur Cowley, FRS, FRSE, FInstP was an English physicist who specialised in the excitations of solids. Biography Cowley was born in Woodford Green, Essex, on 24 February 1939. His father, Cecil Arthur Cowley, was a chartered surveyor, and his mother Mildred Sarah Nash was from a farming family. During World War II, the family evacuated to Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, later moving to Shenfield and on to Gidea Park, Essex. He was educated at Brentwood School, where he had won a scholarship, and afterwards he entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences. Cowley woul...

#2172

Ronald Kantowski

#59725

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Ronald Kantowski is a theoretical cosmologist, well known in the field of general relativity as the author, together with Rainer K. Sachs, of the Kantowski–Sachs dust solutions to the Einstein field equation. These are a widely used family of inhomogeneous cosmological models.

#2173

Harlan James Smith

Harlan James Smith

#59689

Overall Influence

1924 - 1991 (67 years)

Harlan James Smith was an American astronomer. He served as director of the University of Texas McDonald Observatory from 1963 to 1989, where, among other accomplishments, he initiated the construction of the Harlan J. Smith Telescope, a 2.7-meter reflector bearing his name .

#2174

Sang-Wook Cheong

#50715

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sang Wook Cheong is a Korean American materials scientist at Rutgers University. He has made ground-breaking contributions to the research field of enhanced physical functionalities in complex materials originating from collective correlations and collective phase transitions such as colossal magnetoresistive and colossal magnetoelectric effects in complex oxides. He has also made pivotal contributions to mesoscopic self-organization in solids, including the nanoscale charge stripe formation, mesoscopic electronic phase separation in mixed valent transition metal oxides, and the formation of t...

#2175

Yoshio Bando

#75667

Overall Influence

#2176

Milan K. Sanyal

Milan K. Sanyal

#66334

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Milan K. Sanyal is an Indian physicist, active in the fields of surface physics, nanoscience and nanotechnology. Prof. Sanyal was the director of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics from 2009 to 2014 and is now Senior Professor in the institute. Recently he has been appointed co-chairman of the India-Japan Science Council.

#2177

Cornelis Johannes van Houten

#46196

Overall Influence

1920 - 2002 (82 years)

Cornelis Johannes van Houten was a Dutch astronomer, sometimes referred to as Kees van Houten. Early life and education Born in The Hague, he spent his entire career at Leiden University except for a brief period as a research assistant at Yerkes Observatory.

#2178

Ingo Sick

#66441

Overall Influence

1939 - 2021 (82 years)

Ingo Sick was a Swiss experimental nuclear physicist. Sick earned his PhD in 1968 at the University of Basel. In 1983, he became an ausserordentlicher Professor for Experimental Physics at Basel. In 1993, he succeeded Eugene Baumgartner and became an ordentlicher Professor. In 2004 he retired as an emeritus professor. He worked primarily on electron scattering from atomic nuclei and nucleons.

#2179

Philip Campbell

Philip Campbell

#22406

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sir Philip Henry Montgomery Campbell is a British astrophysicist. He served as editor-in-chief of the peer reviewed scientific journal Nature from 1995 to 2018. From 2018 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the publishing company Springer Nature until his retirement in May 2023.

#2180

Hong-Yee Chiu

#39893

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Hong-Yee Chiu is a Taiwanese-American astrophysicist, at NASA for 35 years, and successful publisher of EHGBooks micro-publishing company. He was born in Shanghai, China. Career Chiu graduated from National Taiwan University and in 1959 received his PhD in Astrophysics from Cornell University. After graduation, he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until 1961.

#2181

Michael Prof. Dr. Weller

#75786

Overall Influence

#2182

Nicolò D'Amico

#72483

Overall Influence

1953 - 2020 (67 years)

Nicolò D'Amico , also known as Nichi D’Amico, was an astronomer and President of Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica. Personal life He was born on 28 June 1953 in Palermo. He was married and had a daughter. He died on 15 September 2020 in Cagliari.

#2183

Jon Butterworth

Jon Butterworth

#51324

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Jonathan Mark Butterworth is a Professor of Physics at University College London working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider . His popular science book Smashing Physics, which tells the story of the search for the Higgs boson, was published in 2014 and his newspaper column / blog Life and Physics is published by The Guardian.

#2184

Arthur S. Lodge

#54147

Overall Influence

1922 - 2005 (83 years)

Arthur Scott Lodge was a prominent rheologist and the originator of the Lodge elastic liquid constitutive equation and inventor of the Lodge Stressmeter. Author of two important textbooks in rheology he was one of the founding members of the Rheology Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA.

#2185

Serge Galam

#37578

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Serge Galam is a French physicist and Scientist Emeritus at CNRS. Biography In 1975, Serge Galam obtained a PhD in physics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. In 1981, he received a Ph.D. in physics at Tel Aviv University. From 1981 to 1983, he taught at City University of New York and from 1983 to 1985 at New York University.

#2186

Wayne Hendrickson

#17148

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Wayne A. Hendrickson is an American biophysicist and university professor at Columbia. Dr. Hendrickson is a university professor at Columbia University in the department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and Violin Family Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics. He is also Chief Life Scientist in the Photon Sciences Directorate at Brookhaven National Laboratory and scientific director of the New York Structural Biology Center. Hendrickson has a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, a Ph.D. in biophysics at Johns Hopkins University with Warner Love, and postdoctoral research experience with Jerome Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory .

#2187

Gary S. Grest

#60071

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Gary S. Grest is an American computational physicist at Sandia National Laboratories. He was awarded a B.Sc in physics , an M.S in physics and a Ph.D in physics by the Louisiana State University. His interest is the theory and simulation of nanoscale phenomena.

#2188

Neil F. Johnson

#16868

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Neil Fraser Johnson is an English physicist who is notable for his work in complexity theory and complex systems, spanning quantum information, econophysics, and condensed matter physics. He is currently Professor of Physics at George Washington University in Washington D.C. where he heads up a new initiative in Complexity and Data Science which combines cross-disciplinary fundamental research with data science, with a view to resolving complex real-world problems.

#2189

Felix A. Aharonian

#72463

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Felix A. Aharonian is a physicist and astrophysicist. He is a recognized authority on the origin of cosmic rays, and has written books and research papers on astroparticle physics, and cosmology. Born in Yerevan, Armenia , Aharonian received his Ph.D. from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and is Professor of Astrophysics, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies , Dublin, Ireland and Head of High Energy Astrophysics Theory Group, Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics , Heidelberg, Germany.

#2190

Robert Seiringer

Robert Seiringer

#33601

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Robert Seiringer is an Austrian mathematical physicist. Life and work Seiringer studied physics at the University of Vienna, where in 1999 he acquired his diploma and in 2000 with Jakob Yngvason as thesis advisor attained a doctorate. In 2005 he attained his habilitation qualification at the University of Vienna. With a Schrödinger scholarship, he went in 2001 to Princeton University. There he became in 2003 assistant professor. Starting from 2010 he is an associate professor at McGill University. In addition he is extraordinarius professor at the University of Vienna. Seiringer made subst...

#2191

Yoel Rephaeli

#72655

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Yoel Rephaeli is an Israeli-American cosmologist. He is a Professor of Physics at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Rephaeli studies the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and the astrophysics of galaxy clusters.

#2192

Sami Solanki

#66729

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sami Khan Solanki is director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research , director of the Sun-Heliosphere Department of MPS, a scientific member of the Max Planck Society, and a Chair of the International Max Planck Research School on Physical Processes in the Solar System and Beyond at the Universities of Braunschweig and Göttingen.

#2193

J. Anthony Tyson

#64811

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

John Anthony Tyson is an American physicist and astronomer. Tyson received in 1962 his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and in 1967 his Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin. He was a postdoc from 1967 to 1969 at the University of Chicago. He was then a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1969 to 1985. In 1985 he became a distinguished member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories until 2004. Since 2004 he has been a professor at the University of California, Davis.

#2194

Stacy McGaugh

#65086

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Stacy McGaugh is an American astronomer and professor in the Department of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. His fields of specialty include low surface brightness galaxies, galaxy formation and evolution, tests of dark matter and alternative hypotheses, and measurements of cosmological parameters.

#2195

Hiranmay Sen Gupta

Hiranmay Sen Gupta

#42238

Overall Influence

1934 - 2022 (88 years)

Hiranmay Sen Gupta, , was a Bangladeshi physicist who specialised in nuclear physics. In a career spanning five decades he published over 200 research papers and was made a fellow of Bangladesh Academy of Sciences in 1977.

#2196

Donald C. Backer

Donald C. Backer

#59044

Overall Influence

1943 - 2010 (67 years)

Donald Charles Backer was an American astrophysicist who primarily worked in radio astronomy. Backer made important contributions to the understanding and study of pulsars , black holes, and the epoch of reionization.

#2197

Steven J. Ostro

Steven J. Ostro

#51199

Overall Influence

1946 - 2008 (62 years)

Steven Jeffrey Ostro was an American scientist specializing in radar astronomy. He worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ostro led radar observations of numerous asteroids, as well as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings, and Mars and its satellites. As of May 2008, Ostro and his collaborators had detected 222 near-Earth asteroids and 118 main belt objects with radar.

#2198

Nicholas Read

#41243

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Nicholas Read is an American physicist, noted for his work on strongly interacting quantum many-body systems. Biography Read was born in Britain in 1958 and did his undergraduate education at Cambridge University. He completed his PhD at the Imperial College, London after which he moved to the United States. Read worked as a post-doctoral researcher, first at Brown University, and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Yale University as an assistant professor in 1988, where he has been ever since.

#2199

Jeyhan Kartaltepe

#52669

Overall Influence

Jeyhan Sevim Kartaltepe is an American astronomer, Associate Professor and Director of the Rochester Institute of Technology Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics. Her research considers observational astronomy and galaxy evolution. She is a lead investigator on the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey and the COSMOS-Webb Survey conducted on the James Webb Space Telescope.

#2200

Antti Kupiainen

#23997

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Antti Kupiainen is a Finnish mathematical physicist. Education and career Kupiainen completed his undergraduate education in 1976 at the Technical University of Helsinki and received his Ph.D. in 1979 from Princeton University under Thomas C. Spencer with thesis Some rigorous results on the 1/n expansion. As a postdoc he spent the academic year 1979/80 at Harvard University and then did research at the University of Helsinki. He became a professor of mathematics in 1989 at Rutgers University and in 1991 at the University of Helsinki.

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