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,

#2301

Maura McLaughlin

#62485

Overall Influence

Maura McLaughlin is currently an astrophysics professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. She holds a Bachelor's of Science degree from Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She is known for her work on furthering the research on gravitational waves and for her dedication to the Pulsar Search Collaboratory. She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021.

#2302

John Papaloizou

John Papaloizou

#50219

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

John Christopher Baillie Papaloizou FRS is a British theoretical physicist. Papaloizou is a professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. He works on the theory of accretion disks, with particular application to the formation of planets. He received his D.Phil. in 1972 from the University of Sussex under the supervision of Roger J. Tayler. The title of his thesis is The Vibrational Instability in Massive Stars.

#2303

Ivan R. King

#70466

Overall Influence

1927 - 2021 (94 years)

Ivan Robert King was an American astronomer. His notable works include work on structures of globular clusters, stellar photometry and the Hubble Space Telescope. Career Ivan Robert King was born on June 25, 1927, in Queens, New York, the son of Myram King and Anne née Franzblau. He was awarded an academic scholarship to Lawrence Woodmere Academy, where he completed his elementary and secondary schooling. At the age of sixteen he enrolled at Hamilton College, graduating at nineteen with a bachelor's degree in German, Physics and Mathematics. He then entered the Astrophysics graduate program a...

#2304

Nicola Scafetta

#34017

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Nicola Scafetta is a research scientist and at the University of Napoli Federico II. He was formerly at the ACRIM Lab group and an adjunct assistant professor in the physics department at Duke University. His research interests are in theoretical and applied statistics and nonlinear models of complex processes. He is notable for having controversial views on climate change.

#2305

Loup Verlet

#29807

Overall Influence

1931 - 2019 (88 years)

Loup Verlet was a French physicist who pioneered the computer simulation of molecular dynamics models. In a famous 1967 paper he used what is now known as Verlet integration and the Verlet list . He received his PhD in 1957; his PhD work was initially conducted in the group of Victor Weisskopf at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and concluded under the guidance of Maurice Lévy at the École normale supérieure in Paris. From 1957 to 1993 he worked mostly on the physics of the liquid state.

#2306

Predhiman Krishan Kaw

#61323

Overall Influence

1948 - 2017 (69 years)

Predhiman Krishan Kaw was an Indian plasma physicist. He had been the founding director of the Institute for Plasma Research and served the institute as the director from 1986 to 2012. Biography Kaw was born on 15 January 1948 in Srinagar , India. He matriculated from Punjab University and completed his M.Sc. from Agra University in 1964. He received PhD from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1966 under Supervision of Prof. M. S. Sodha, and was the first Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Kaw received his Ph.D. at the age of 18, following which he completed his PostDoc at Princeton University.

#2307

Marika Taylor

#48502

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Marika Maxine Taylor is a Professor of Theoretical Physics, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Head of College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Birmingham. She started this role in September 2023 after being Head of School for Physics at the University of Southampton.

#2308

Arcadio Poveda

#41777

Overall Influence

1930 - 2022 (92 years)

Renán Arcadio Poveda Ricalde was a Mexican prominent astronomer who developed a method to calculate the mass of elliptical galaxies. He received Mexico's National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1975, chaired its National Astronomical Observatory from 1968 to 1980 and was elected to The National College in 1989.

#2309

Sixto González

#45629

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Sixto A. González Edick was the Director of the Arecibo Observatory from September 29, 2003, to September 15, 2006. Arecibo Observatory was an astronomical observatory located in Puerto Rico. At the time of González's directorship Arecibo was the world's largest single dish radio telescope. González was the first Puerto Rican in the position of Director of the observatory.

#2310

Jean-Claude Pecker

Jean-Claude Pecker

#37661

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Jean-Claude Pecker was a French astronomer, astrophysicist and author, member of the French Academy of Sciences and director of the Nice Observatory. He served as the secretary-general of the International Astronomical Union from 1964 to 1967. Pecker was the President of the Société astronomique de France , the French amateur astronomical society, from 1973–1976. He was awarded the Prix Jules Janssen by the French Astronomical Society in 1967. A minor planet is named after him. Pecker was a vocal opponent of astrology and pseudo-science and was the president of the Association française po...

#2311

Carl Nordling

#59784

Overall Influence

1931 - 2016 (85 years)

Carl Nordling was a Swedish physicist who was a professor of physics at Uppsala University. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and served as the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

#2312

Luciano Fonda

#44590

Overall Influence

1931 - 1998 (67 years)

Luciano Fonda was an Italian theoretical physicist, author of a hundred of scientific publications, including a book on quantum symmetries. His research activity covered several areas, from nuclear and subnuclear physics to condensed state physics.

#2313

Carlos Bertulani

Carlos Bertulani

#58063

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Carlos A. Bertulani is a Brazilian and American theoretical physicist and professor at the department of physics of the Texas A&M University-Commerce. He graduated, PhD, at University of Bonn and works on nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics. He was formerly a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro from 1980-2000.

#2314

Douglas N. C. Lin

#60980

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Douglas N. C. Lin is professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was born in New York and grew up in Beijing. He earned his BSc from McGill University, his PhD from the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University, and performed postdoctoral research at both Harvard and Cambridge. In 1979 he took an Assistant Professorship at UCSC, and has remained there since. He is also the founding director of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University.

#2315

Vasundara Varadan

#75970

Overall Influence

Vasundara Venkatraman Varadan is a professor emeritus at University of Arkansas and a Fellow of SPIE. Her research considerers microwave sensors and new materials for solar panels. She served on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University for 22 years.

#2316

Joseph A. Berry

#78845

Overall Influence

#2317

Arlie Petters

#22763

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Arlie Oswald Petters, MBE is a Belizean-American mathematical physicist, who is the Benjamin Powell Professor of mathematics and a professor of physics and economics at Duke University. Petters became the provost at New York University Abu Dhabi effective September 1, 2020. Petters is a founder of mathematical astronomy, focusing on problems connected to the interplay of gravity and light and employing tools from astrophysics, cosmology, general relativity, high energy physics, differential geometry, singularities, and probability theory. His monograph "Singularity Theory and Gravitational Lensing" developed a mathematical theory of gravitational lensing.

#2318

Paolo Giubellino

Paolo Giubellino

#37658

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Paolo Giubellino is an experimental particle physicist working on High-Energy Nuclear Collisions. Currently he is the joint Scientific Managing Director of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research and the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research and Professor at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

#2319

Mikhail Volkenstein

#40112

Overall Influence

1912 - 1992 (80 years)

Mikhail Vladimirovich Volkenshtein was a notable Soviet and Russian biophysicist, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor and Doctor of Sciences. In his publications in English his name is written as M. V. Volkenstein.

#2320

Claus Montonen

#27580

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Claus Kalevi Montonen is a Finnish theoretical physicist, most known for his work with British physicist David Olive in proposing the Montonen–Olive duality. Life Claus Montonen received his MSc from the University of Helsinki in 1968 and his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1974, where he was taught by David Olive before he left for CERN. He held research fellowships at Orsay, CNRS and CERN. From 1974 he has held various research and teaching positions at the University of Helsinki and Helsinki Institute of Physics.

#2321

Carolin Crawford

#63708

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Carolin Susan Crawford is a British communicator of science and astrophysicist. She is an emeritus member of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge and an emeritus fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

#2322

Tom Lubensky

#63839

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Tom C. Lubensky is an American physicist. He is currently the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Mary Amanda Wood professor of physics and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

#2323

Sarah Tuttle

#68555

Overall Influence

Sarah Tuttle is an astrophysicist and assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Washington. Tuttle builds spectrographs to detect nearby galaxies, including work on VIRUS installed on McDonald Observatory's Hobby–Eberly Telescope to study dark energy, and FIREBall , the world's first fiber fed ultraviolet spectrograph.

#2324

R. Rox Anderson

R. Rox Anderson

#28655

Overall Influence

1950 - 2007 (57 years)

Richard Rox Anderson, FAAD , is a Boston-based dermatologist and entrepreneur. Education and career Anderson earned his BS degree from MIT, and then pursued his MD degree graduating magna cum laude from the joint MIT-Harvard medical program, Health Sciences and Technology. Anderson completed his residency in dermatology and research fellowship at Harvard University.

#2325

Anja Cetti Andersen

Anja Cetti Andersen

#56976

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Anja Cetti Andersen is an astronomer and astrophysicist from Hørsholm, Denmark. Life She received her BSc in 1991, MSc in astronomy in 1995, and her PhD in 1999, from the University of Copenhagen. Her thesis was titled "Cosmic Dust and Late-Type Stars". Her postdoctoral research was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, firstly at the Department of Astronomy & Space Physics, Uppsala University, and then at the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Copenhagen. After this she was funded by her home institution and received a Diploma in Higher Education Teaching and Teaching Practice from the Faculty of Sciences.

#2326

David Stuart

#75876

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Sir David Ian Stuart is a Medical Research Council Professor of Structural Biology at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford where he is also a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. He is best known for his contributions to the X-ray crystallography of viruses, in particular for determining the structures of foot-and-mouth disease virus, bluetongue virus and the membrane-containing phages PRD1 and PM2. He is also director of Instruct and Life Sciences Director at Diamond Light Source.

#2327

Josef Meixner

#37088

Overall Influence

1908 - 1994 (86 years)

Josef Meixner was a German theoretical physicist, known for his work on the physics of deformable bodies, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, Meixner polynomials, Meixner–Pollaczek polynomials, and spheroidal wave functions.

#2328

Pascale Ehrenfreund

Pascale Ehrenfreund

#30231

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Pascale Ehrenfreund is an Austrian astrophysicist. Ehrenfreund holds degrees from the University of Vienna and Webster Leiden . Prior to becoming a Research Professor of Space Policy and International Affairs at George Washington University, she was a professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, Leiden University, and University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She was the first woman president of the Austrian Science Fund and from 2015-2020, she was the CEO of the German Aerospace Center. Since 2019, she is the President of the International Astronautical Federation and since 2018, she is the Chancellor of the International Space University .

#2329

Peter Pershan

#57547

Overall Influence

Peter S. Pershan is a prominent American physicist. Education and career Peter Pershan earned his B.S. at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1956 and his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1960 for nuclear magnetic resonance under the supervision of Nicolaas Bloembergen. After a short postdoctoral appointment with Bloembergen he was appointed an assistant professor at Harvard University, where he is now a Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science, at both Physics Department and Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

#2330

Paul Kalas

#49070

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Paul Kalas is a Greek American astronomer known for his discoveries of debris disks around stars. Kalas led a team of scientists to obtain the first visible-light images of an extrasolar planet with orbital motion around the star Fomalhaut, at a distance of 25 light years from Earth. The planet is referred to as Fomalhaut b.

#2331

Marcelo Damy

#43856

Overall Influence

1914 - 2009 (95 years)

Marcelo Damy de Sousa Santos was a Brazilian physicist. Considered as one of the most important educators and researchers in physics in Brazil, along with Cesar Lattes, José Leite Lopes and Mario Schenberg, Damy was born in Campinas, São Paulo, in 1914, the son of Harald Egydio de Souza Santos a photographer, and Maria Luiza Damy de Souza Santos. He did his secondary studies in the State Gymnasium and was a keen student of sciences, particularly physics and chemistry.

#2332

Michal Lipson

#40147

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Michal Lipson is an American physicist known for her work on silicon photonics. A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2019, Lipson was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow for contributions to silicon photonics especially towards enabling GHz silicon active devices . Until 2014, she was the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering at Cornell University in the school of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Cornell. She is now the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. In 2009 she co-founded the company PicoLuz, which develops and commercializes silicon nanophotonics technologies.

#2333

Warrick Couch

#58107

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Warrick John Couch is an Australian professional astronomer. He is currently a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. He was previously the Director of Australia's largest optical observatory, the Australian Astronomical Observatory . He was also the president of the Australian Institute of Physics , and a non-executive director on the Board of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization. He was a founding non-executive director of Astronomy Australia Limited.

#2334

Wick Haxton

#70538

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Wick C. Haxton is an American theoretical nuclear physicist and astrophysicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was appointed a co-editor of the journal Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science as of 2023.

#2335

Swapan Chattopadhyay

Swapan Chattopadhyay

#36164

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Swapan Chattopadhyay CorrFRSE is an Indian American physicist. Chattopadhyay completed his PhD from the University of California in 1982. Currently, Chattopadhyay is part-time Faculty at University of California at Berkeley, adjunct professor of photon science at SLAC, Stanford University, and emeritus president's professor at Northern Illinois University and distinguished scientist emeritus at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , where he was a member of the director's senior leadership team and was director of the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between Fermilab and NIU...

#2336

Helmut W. Schulz

#48272

Overall Influence

1912 - 2006 (94 years)

Helmut W. Schulz was a German chemical engineer and professor at Columbia University known for his many works in disparate fields like nuclear physics, rocketry and waste-to-energy processes. He developed the process for separating uranium isotopes.

#2337

Mary L. Boas

#27521

Overall Influence

1917 - 2010 (93 years)

Mary Layne Boas was an American mathematician and physics professor best known as the author of Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences , an undergraduate textbook that was still widely used in college classrooms as of 1999.

#2338

Virginia Louise Trimble

Virginia Louise Trimble

#61459

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Virginia Louise Trimble is an American astronomer specializing in the structure and evolution of stars and galaxies, and the history of astronomy. She has published more than 600 works in Astrophysics, and dozens of other works in the history of other sciences. She is famous for an annual review of astronomy and astrophysics research that was published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and often gives summary reviews at astrophysical conferences. In 2018, she was elected a Patron of the American Astronomical Society, for her many years of intellectual, organiz...

#2339

Claude Wendell Horton Jr.

#76277

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Professor Wendell Horton is a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin and a student of plasma physics. Horton's core area of research is plasma transport and its application to the development of nuclear fusion power. Horton is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

#2340

Leonid Pastur

#15334

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Leonid Andreevich Pastur is a Ukrainian mathematical physicist and theoretical physicist, known in particular for contributions to random matrix theory, the spectral theory of random Schrödinger operators, statistical mechanics, and solid state physics . Currently, he heads the Department of Theoretical Physics at the B Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering.

#2341

Kostya Ostrikov

#74892

Overall Influence

Kostya Ostrikov is a Ukrainian-Australian physicist and academic, professor at Queensland University of Technology and scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, member of Academia Europaea. He was awarded the Pawsey Medal and the Walter Boas Medal .

#2342

Roger Bouillon

#79543

Overall Influence

#2343

Milton A. Rothman

#45184

Overall Influence

1919 - 2001 (82 years)

Milton A. Rothman was a United States nuclear physicist and college professor. He was also an active science fiction fan and a co-founder of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. An occasional author as well, he published stories usually with the pseudonym "Lee Gregor".

#2344

Shin'ichi Nojiri

#73210

Overall Influence

Shin'ichi Nojiri is a Japanese physicist active in the field of theoretical cosmology, with particular emphasis on long-range modified models of gravity. He collaborated on these topics with Sergei Odintsov. Nojiri works at the Division of Particle and Astrophysical Science of the Nagoya University.

#2345

Alexandr Boyarchuk

#79626

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

Alexandr Boyarchuk was a Russian physicist and astronomer. Life In 1953, he graduated from Leningrad University. After graduation, he worked at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, which was under direction of the USSR Academy of Sciences at the time. Later, he was elected a corresponding member of the same organization, and worked as an academician there until 1987. From 1987 to 2003, he was the director of the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. From 1991 to 1993, he was also President of the International Astronomical Union.

#2346

Annette Zippelius

#39477

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Annette Zippelius is a German physicist at the University of Göttingen. In 1998 she became a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize winner. Her research focuses on complex fluids and soft matter – materials that are intermediate between conventional liquids and solids. Examples are glasses, polymeric melts or solutions, gels and foams, but also granular matter. With her research group she aims at elucidating the underlying principles of self-organization that govern their behavior.

#2347

Tomasz Dietl

#19328

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Tomasz Dietl is a Polish physicist, a professor and a head of Laboratory for Cryogenic and Spintronic Research at the Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences and professor of The Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Warsaw. His research interest includes semiconductors, spintronics and nanotechnology. With over 20,000 citations he is considered one of the leading Polish physicists.

#2348

Dan Hooper

#79746

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Daniel Wayne Hooper is an American cosmologist and particle physicist specializing in the areas of dark matter, cosmic rays, and neutrino astrophysics. He is a senior scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

#2349

Vasilis Ntziachristos

#40917

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Vasilis Ntziachristos is a Greek American biomedical engineer, scientist, and inventor best known for his development of fundamental and translational research tools for imaging tissues based on fluorescence and optoacoustics.

#2350

Gabriel Aeppli

#28485

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Gabriel Aeppli, PhD FRS is a Swiss-American electrical engineer, co-founder of the London Centre for Nanotechnology and professor of physics at ETH Zürich and EPF Lausanne, and head of the Synchrotron and Nanotechnology department of the Paul Scherrer Institute, also in Switzerland.

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