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.

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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#2251

Peter Fulde

#29861

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Peter Fulde is a physicist working in condensed matter theory and quantum chemistry. Fulde received a PhD degree at the University of Maryland in 1963. After spending more than one year as a postdoc with Michael Tinkham in Berkeley, he returned in 1965 to Germany where he obtained a chair for theoretical physics in 1968 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/M. From 1971 to 1974 he was in charge of the theory group of the Institute Max von Laue-Paul Langevin in Garching. In 1971 he became a director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart where he serv...

#2252

Wang Yifang

#65045

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Wang Yifang is a Chinese particle and accelerator physicist. He is director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and known for contributions to neutrino physics, in particular his leading role at Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment to determine the last unknown neutrino mixing angle θ 13 .

#2253

Lars Brink

#55780

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Lars Elof Gustaf Brink was a Swedish theoretical physicist. He made significant and well-cited contributions in supersymmetry, supergravity, superspace, and superstrings, and the connections among them. In 1977, with John Schwarz and Joël Scherk, he introduced the first supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories.

#2254

Robert Lin

#69684

Overall Influence

1942 - 2012 (70 years)

Robert Peichung Lin was Chinese-born American astrophysicist. He was a professor and director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. As a pioneer of gamma-ray astronomy and of particle detection in space, his research was fundamental to the development of our knowledge in solar physics, the physics of the solar wind and of the magnetosphere. He was the principal investigator for the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager.

#2255

Yaël Nazé

#46701

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Yaël Nazé is a Belgian astrophysicist, author and professor at the University of Liège. She specializes in massive stars and their interactions with their surroundings. In her research, she has worked with images and data collected from various space telescopes and has worked on creating new observation satellites.

#2256

John Madey

#23731

Overall Influence

1943 - 2016 (73 years)

John M. J. Madey was a professor of Physics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, a former director of the Free Electron Laser Laboratory at Duke University, and formerly a professor at Stanford University. He is best known for his development of the free-electron laser at Stanford University in the 1970s.

#2257

Peter Wadhams

#32694

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Peter Wadhams ScD , is emeritus professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work on sea ice.

#2258

Ken Pounds

#57196

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Kenneth Alwyne Pounds, CBE, FRS is Emeritus Professor of physics at the University of Leicester. Early life He was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, where he went to Salt Grammar School . He then attended University College London where he gained his BSc and in 1961 a PhD under the supervision of Harrie Massey and Robert Lewis Fullarton Boyd.

#2259

Andrew J. Hanson

Andrew J. Hanson

#27211

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Andrew J. Hanson is an American theoretical physicist and computer scientist. Hanson is best known in theoretical physics as the co-discoverer of the Eguchi–Hanson metric, the first Gravitational instanton. This Einstein metric is asymptotically locally Euclidean and self-dual, closely parallel to the Yang-Mills instanton. He is also known as the co-author of Constrained Hamiltonian Systems and of Gravitation, Gauge Theories, and Differential Geometry, which attempted to bridge the gap between theoretical physicists and mathematicians at a time when concepts relevant to the two disciplines were rapidly unifying.

#2260

Volker Springel

#77513

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

#2261

Alvin Trivelpiece

Alvin Trivelpiece

#11277

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Alvin William Trivelpiece was an American physicist whose varied career included positions as director of the Office of Energy Research of the U.S. Department of Energy , executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , and director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory . He was also a professor of physics and a corporate executive. Trivelpiece's research focused on plasma physics, controlled thermonuclear research, and particle accelerators. He received several patents for accelerators and microwave devices. He died in Rancho Santa Margarita, California in August 2...

#2262

Boris Shklovskii

#49234

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Boris Ionovich Shklovskii is a theoretical physicist, at the William I Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota, specializing in condensed matter. Shklovskii earned his A.B. degree in Physics, in 1966 and a Ph.D. in condensed matter theory, in 1968 from Leningrad University.

#2263

Olli Lounasmaa

#40586

Overall Influence

1930 - 2002 (72 years)

Olli Viktor Lounasmaa was a Finnish academician, experimental physicist and neuroscientist. He was known for his research in low temperature physics, especially for experimental proof of the superfluidity of helium-3 and also for his work in the field of magnetoencephalography.

#2264

Brian Warner

#63829

Overall Influence

1939 - 2023 (84 years)

Brian Warner was a British South African optical astronomer who was Emeritus Distinguished Professor of natural philosophy at the University of Cape Town. Warner's research included cataclysmic variable stars, pulsars, degenerate stars and binary stars. He also researched and published on the history of astronomy in South Africa.

#2265

Charles F. McMillan

Charles F. McMillan

#20890

Overall Influence

Charles F. McMillan is an American nuclear physicist and served as the 10th director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His appointment was effective June 1, 2011. He succeeded Michael R. Anastasio. On September 5, 2017, McMillan announced he would be leaving the director position at the end of the year.

#2266

Brian Cox

#29117

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Brian Cox was born in Lancashire, England in 1968. He is best known as a popularizer of science, having hosted Wonders of the Universe and many other shows produced by the BBC. He has authored popular science books Why Does E=mc²? and The Quantum Universe and has given a number of talks at TED on the topic of particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While playing the keyboard for the group Dare, and later for D:Ream, Cox completed his BS and MPhil degrees in physics at the University of Manchester. After D:Ream disbanded, Cox finished his PhD in high energy particle physics, also at UMAN where he can still be found working as a professor of particle physics.

#2267

Manu Prakash

#14237

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Manu Prakash is an Indian scientist who is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. Manu was born in Meerut, India. He is best known for his contributions to the Foldscope and Paperfuge. Prakash received the MacArthur Fellowship in September 2016. He and his team are also working on a water droplet based computer in Stanford University. His work focuses on frugal innovation that makes medicine, computing and microscopy accessible to more people across the world.

#2268

James R. Wait

#63475

Overall Influence

1924 - 1998 (74 years)

James R. Wait was a Canadian electrical engineer and engineering physicist. In 1977, he was elected as a member of National Academy of Engineering in Electronics, Communication & Information Systems Engineering for his contributions to electromagnetic propagation engineering as it affects communication and geophysical exploration.

#2269

Raphael Tsu

#35601

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

Raphael Tsu is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is Professor Emeritus of electrical engineering at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC. Early life and education Tsu was born to a Catholic family in Shanghai, China, in 1931. As a child he was inspired by his great uncle who in 1926 was amongst the first six Chinese bishops ever to be consecrated at the Vatican in Rome and as a teenager by his US-educated father, Adrian, and French-educated uncle, Louis. His paternal grandfather and great uncle were pioneers in power plant and modern shipyard in Shanghai. W...

#2270

Wang Daheng

#21264

Overall Influence

1915 - 2011 (96 years)

Wang Daheng was a Chinese optical physicist, engineer, and inventor widely considered the "father of optical engineering" in China. He was a founding academician of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He was the founder of the Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Changchun University of Science and Technology, and the Chinese Optical Society.

#2271

Kenneth Allen

#67847

Overall Influence

1923 - 1997 (74 years)

Kenneth William Allen was Professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Oxford, England. The Independent stated that "Allen will be best remembered for his outstanding contributions to nuclear structure physics and for his advocacy of the use of electrostatic nuclear accelerators in other areas of science. Accelerators – otherwise known as "atom smashers" – are machines used for studying nuclear reactions by creating beams of high-energy particles."

#2272

F. James Rutherford

#31180

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (100 years)

Floyd James Ervin Rutherford was an American science professor, and the founder of AAAS's Project 2061, a long-term effort to reform science education in the United States. He has been involved in Harvard Project Physics and Project City Science, and he also was an assistant director at the National Science Foundation with President Jimmy Carter, an assistant director of the United States Department of Education and educational director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

#2273

Toshio Yanagida

#14943

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Toshio Yanagida is a Japanese biophysicist famous for his pioneer research in single molecule biology, and made important contributions to single molecule fluorescence microscopy. Contribution Yanagida has been leading the development of single molecule detection techniques to study molecular motors, enzyme reactions, protein dynamics, and cell signaling since he succeeded in the direct observation of motion of single F-actin filaments in the presence of myosin in 1984. His single molecule experiments designed to investigate how thermal fluctuations play a positive role in the unique operati...

#2274

Janusz Andrzej Zakrzewski

#76633

Overall Influence

1932 - 2008 (76 years)

Janusz Andrzej Zakrzewski was a Polish physicist. He was a professor of the University of Warsaw , member of the Warsaw Scientific Society , Polish Academy of Sciences , Polish Academy of Learning. He served as president of the Polish Physical Society between 1987–1991.

#2275

David Douglass

#52983

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

David H. Douglass is an American physicist at the University of Rochester. Background Climate change A 2005 study by Douglass and fellow University of Rochester physicist Robert S. Knox argued that global climate models underestimated the climate response to the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. The study also contended that global temperature returned to normal much faster after the eruption than the models had predicted.

#2276

Nikolai Chernykh

#12949

Overall Influence

1931 - 2004 (73 years)

Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh was a Russian-born Ukrainian-Soviet astronomer and discoverer of minor planets and comets at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnyi, Crimea. Biography and work Chernykh was born in the Russian city of Usman in Voronezh Oblast, in present-day Lipetsk Oblast. He specialized in astrometry and the dynamics of small bodies in the Solar System and worked at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory from 1963.

#2277

Steven G. Johnson

#18789

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Steven Glenn Johnson is an American mathematician known for being a co-creator of the FFTW library for software-based fast Fourier transforms and for his work on photonic crystals. He is professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics at MIT where he leads a group on Nanostructures and Computation.

#2278

Karl Rawer

#27890

Overall Influence

1913 - 2018 (105 years)

Karl Maria Alois Rawer was a German specialist in radio wave propagation and the ionosphere. He developed the analytical code to determine suitable frequency ranges for short wave communication by which German forces built-up their long distance communications during World War II.

#2279

George F. Bertsch

#77373

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

George F. Bertsch is an American nuclear physicist. Bertsch received in 1962 his bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College and in 1965 his Ph.D. from Princeton University. In 1965–1966 he was a postdoc at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He was in 1966–1968 an instructor and in 1968–1971 an assistant professor at Princeton . He was in 1971–1974 an assistant professor and in 1974–1985 a full professor at Michigan State University. In 1985 he became a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. From 1996 to 2005 he was editor-in-chief of Reviews of Modern Physics.

#2280

Hendrik J. Monkhorst

#77912

Overall Influence

#2281

Richard Wilson

#29283

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Richard Wilson was a British-American physicist. His original fields were nuclear and elementary particle physics but branched out into applications of physics in other disciplines. Most of his career he has been a physics professor at Harvard University.

#2282

Kevin Luhman

#77952

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Kevin Luhman is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics from Pennsylvania State University who discovered both the third-closest stellar system, Luhman 16, and the fourth-closest stellar system, WISE 0855−0714, to the Sun. Both systems are composed of substellar objects , falling into the category of brown dwarfs or even less massive objects which are categorized as sub-brown dwarfs but also referred to as "free floating planets" or "planetary mass objects". WISE 0855−0714 is the coldest massive object outside the solar system that has been directly imaged.

#2283

Basil Altaie

#49710

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mohammad Basil Altaie is an Iraqi physicist, philosopher and professor of theoretical physics at Yarmouk University in Jordan. Biography Muhammad Basil Altaie was born on March 5, 1952, in Mosul, Iraq, where he completed his primary and secondary education. He enrolled in Mosul University in 1970, where he chose to study physics, a subject he had been interested in since high school. Following his graduation from the University of Mosul in June 1974, he was awarded a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in theoretical physics by the Iraqi government. He enrolled in the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom the same year, where he received his Ph.D.

#2284

Edward Ginzton

#18691

Overall Influence

1915 - 1998 (83 years)

Edward Leonard Ginzton was a Ukrainian-American engineer. Education Ginzton completed his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1941.

#2285

Andrew Steane

#33314

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Andrew Martin Steane is Professor of physics at the University of Oxford. He is also a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He was a student at St Edmund Hall, Oxford where he obtained his MA and DPhil.

#2286

A. K. Jonscher

#67299

Overall Influence

1922 - 2005 (83 years)

Andrzej Karol Jonscher was a Polish-British physicist at Chelsea College and then Royal Holloway, University of London. Jonscher pioneered the study of emergent phenomena in natural systems, and dielectric behaviour in particular. The Universal dielectric response whereby power law scaling of conductivity with frequency is found in heterogeneous materials under alternating current conditions has drawn significant attention due to its significance in many technological applications. Although this scaling behaviour is observed across a tremendously wide range of systems, there is yet no consensus regarding the origins of such emergent dielectric responses.

#2287

Steve Fossey

#43900

Overall Influence

Stephen John Fossey is a British astronomer working at UCL Observatory, which is part of University College London . He discovered the nearby supernova SN 2014J and is one of the three editors of The Observatory magazine.

#2288

Thomas Curtright

#54625

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Thomas L. Curtright is a theoretical physicist at the University of Miami. He did undergraduate work in physics at the University of Missouri , and graduate work at Caltech under the supervision of Richard Feynman.

#2289

Apoorva D. Patel

Apoorva D. Patel

#18443

Overall Influence

Apoorva D. Patel is a professor at the Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is notable for his work on quantum algorithms, and the application of information theory concepts to understand the structure of genetic languages. His major field of work has been the theory of quantum chromodynamics, where he has used lattice gauge theory techniques to investigate spectral properties, phase transitions, and matrix elements.

#2290

Salvatore Torquato

Salvatore Torquato

#63246

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Salvatore Torquato is an American theoretical scientist born in Falerna, Italy. His research work has impacted a variety of fields, including physics, chemistry, applied and pure mathematics, materials science, engineering, and biological physics. He is the Lewis Bernard Professor of Natural Sciences in the department of chemistry and Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials at Princeton University. He has been a senior faculty fellow in the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, an enterprise dedicated to exploring frontiers across the theoretical natural sciences. ...

#2291

Carl-Gunne Fälthammar

#36617

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Carl-Gunne Fälthammar is Professor Emeritus at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, specialising in space and plasma physics in the School of Electrical Engineering. He succeeded Hannes Alfvén as Professor of Plasma Physics in 1975.

#2292

Siegfried Adolf Wouthuysen

#46295

Overall Influence

1916 - 1996 (80 years)

Siegfried Adolf Wouthuysen was a Dutch physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics. Early life Wouthuysen was born in Amsterdam in 1916. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Chemistry at Ghent University in 1936 and his master's degree in Mathematics and Physics at Leiden University in 1939.

#2293

Rubin Braunstein

#21414

Overall Influence

1922 - 2018 (96 years)

Rubin Braunstein was an American physicist and educator. In 1955 he published the first measurements of light emission by semiconductor diodes made from crystals of gallium arsenide , gallium antimonide , and indium phosphide . GaAs, GaSb, and InP are examples of III-V semiconductors. The III-V semiconductors absorb and emit light much more strongly than silicon, which is the best-known semiconductor. Braunstein's devices are the forerunners of contemporary LED lighting and semiconductor lasers, which typically employ III-V semiconductors. The 2000 and 2014 Nobel Prizes in Physics were awarde...

#2294

Ian Morison

#68434

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ian Morison FRAS is an astronomer and astrophysicist who served as the 35th Gresham Professor of Astronomy. Life Morison was born in Felpham, England. He attended Chichester High School before going on to study Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Hertford College, University of Oxford. He lives in Macclesfield, England with his wife Judy.

#2295

Donald R. Yennie

#42007

Overall Influence

1924 - 1993 (69 years)

Donald Robert Yennie was an American theoretical physicist and professor at Cornell University. He is known for his work on renormalization in Quantum electrodynamics and for early work on the structure of nucleons.

#2296

Roger Angel

#30842

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

James Roger Prior Angel is a British-born American astronomer. He is Regents Professor and Professor of Astronomy and Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. Education He graduated from St Peter's College, Oxford, with a BA, in 1963, from California Institute of Technology, with an MA in 1966, and from the University of Oxford, with a D Phil, in 1967.

#2297

Eliezer Rabinovici

#60068

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Eliezer Rabinovici is an Israeli theoretical physicist. He is emeritus Professor of Physics at The Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working on theoretical high-energy physics, in particular quantum field theory and string theory.

#2298

Eberhard Umbach

#14293

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Eberhard Umbach is a German physicist. Career He studied physics at the Technical University of Munich and received his doctorate in 1980 with honors. After conducting research in the United States he returned to habilitate at TU Munich in 1986.

#2299

Radu Bălescu

#34713

Overall Influence

1932 - 2006 (74 years)

Radu Bălescu was a Romanian and Belgian scientist and professor at the Statistical and Plasma Physics group of the Université Libre de Bruxelles . He studied at the Titu Maiorescu high school, in Bucharest and the Athénée Royal d'Ixelles . At the ULB he studied chemistry and obtained a PhD in 1958. He started his academic career in 1957 at the ULB as an assistant at the Service de Physique Théorique et Mathématique. He became a professor at the ULB in 1964. He worked on the statistical physics of charged particles and on the theory of transport of magnetically confined plasmas. Radu Bale...

#2300

Hillard Bell Huntington

#71297

Overall Influence

1910 - 1992 (82 years)

Hillard Bell Huntington was a physicist who first proposed, in 1935, that hydrogen could occur in a metallic state. He is also known for his work on the electromigration of atoms, which later became an important consideration in semiconductor electronics.

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