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.

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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#3101

Sergei Rytov

#73252

Overall Influence

1908 - 1996 (88 years)

Sergei Mikhailovich Rytov was a Soviet physicist and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Rytov contributed to the fields of statistical radiophysics, and fluctuational electrodynamics. The Rytov number for laser propagation in the atmosphere and the Rytov approximation for wave propagation in inhomogeneous media bear his name.

#3102

Gerald Goertzel

#13112

Overall Influence

1919 - 2002 (83 years)

Gerald Howard Goertzel was an American theoretical physicist. He worked on the Manhattan Project for the Nuclear Development Corporation of America and later for Sage Instruments. He was an employee of IBM's Research Division where he worked for 28 years in a variety of areas, including design automation, data compression and digital printing technology. He is best known for creating the Goertzel algorithm.

#3103

Jürgen Furthmüller

#94560

Overall Influence

#3104

Thors Hans Hansson

#94265

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Thors Hans Hansson , is a Swedish physicist working as a professor of theoretical physics at Stockholm University, who was also the head of Nordita. He is a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, which each year selects winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

#3105

Aharon Kapitulnik

#58448

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Aharon Kapitulnik is an Israeli-American experimental condensed matter physicist working at Stanford University. He is known primarily for his work on strongly correlated electron systems, low dimensional electronic systems, unconventional superconductors, topological superconductors, superconductivity and magnetism, transport in bad metals and precision measurements.

#3106

Stanislas Leibler

#37870

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Stanislas Leibler is a French–American theoretical and experimental biologist and physicist. He is Systems Biology Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Gladys T. Perkin Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Living Matter at the Rockefeller University.

#3107

Jeremi Wasiutyński

#73764

Overall Influence

1907 - 2005 (98 years)

Jeremi Maria Franciszek Wasiutyński was a Polish-Norwegian astrophysicist, philosopher and depth-psychologist. Life and work Wasiutyński studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at the University of Warsaw, then worked some years at a factory for optical instruments, while writing a text-book in two volumes of general astronomy with professor M. Kamieński. In 1938, after the publication of his prize-winning book about Copernicus , Wasiutyński moved to Norway, where he completed his degree in astrophysics at the University of Oslo 1948. His interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation, Studies in...

#3108

David L. Fried

#60568

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

David L. Fried was an American scientist, best known for his contributions to optics. Fried described what has come to be known as the Fried Parameter, or r0 . The Fried Parameter is a measure of the strength of the turbulence in the atmosphere of Earth. The turbulence causes what is known as seeing in astronomy and usually limits the optical resolution of ground-based telescopes and the detail in their images of astronomical objects. The Fried Parameter describes the smallest diameter of a telescope aperture at which the image fidelity starts to suffer significantly from turbulent airflows in the atmosphere of Earth.

#3109

Maxim Chernodub

#77691

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Maxim Nikolaevich Chernodub is a French physicist of Ukrainian descent best known for his postulation of the magnetic-field-induced superconductivity of the vacuum. Career Beginnings and degrees Chernodub attended Lycée 145 in Kyiv from 1980 to 1990. He earned a bachelor's degree and a master of science, at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, in 1993 and 1996, respectively, and a Ph.D. at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow, in 1999. In 2007, there followed his habilitation at the ITEP.

#3110

David DiVincenzo

#56122

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

David P. DiVincenzo is an American theoretical physicist. He is the director of the Institute of Theoretical Nanoelectronics at the Peter Grünberg Institute at the Forschungszentrum Jülich and professor at the Institute for Quantum Information at RWTH Aachen University. With Daniel Loss , he proposed the Loss–DiVincenzo quantum computer in 1997, which would use electron spins in quantum dots as qubits.

#3111

Edward Rubenstein

Edward Rubenstein

#59834

Overall Influence

1924 - 2019 (95 years)

Edward Rubenstein was an American doctor of internal medicine, with major contributions in the fields of medical education, research , and the arts. Mechanisms of blood clotting Edward Rubenstein was an Internal Medicine physician, with areas of expertise which included clotting disorders that predispose to pulmonary embolism.

#3112

Martin Deutsch

#51267

Overall Influence

1917 - 2002 (85 years)

Martin Deutsch was an Austrian-American professor of physics at MIT. He is best known for being the discoverer of positronium. Early life Deutsch was born in Vienna during the First World War to a Jewish family. Both of his parents were physicians; his mother Helene Deutsch was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna and a student and colleague of Sigmund Freud.

#3113

Franklin Chang-Díaz

Franklin Chang-Díaz

#43862

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Franklin Ramón Chang-Díaz is an American mechanical engineer, physicist and former NASA astronaut. He is the sole founder and CEO of Ad Astra Rocket Company as well as a member of Cummins' board of directors. He became an American citizen in 1977.

#3114

Neville Horner Fletcher

#94810

Overall Influence

#3115

Hans Jürgen Briegel

Hans Jürgen Briegel

#70402

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Hans Jürgen Briegel is a German theoretical physicist. He is Full Professor at the University of Innsbruck and conducts research in the field of quantum physics and quantum information. Biography Briegel studied physics and philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich . In 1990 he graduated with a diploma, and in 1994 he completed the PhD program . He worked as Research Associate at the Texas A&M University and as Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and the University of Innsbruck. During that time he was also visiting scientist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I...

#3116

Nial Tanvir

#85319

Overall Influence

Nial Rahil Tanvir is a British astronomer at the University of Leicester. His research specialisms are the Extragalactic distance scale, Galaxy evolution and Gamma ray bursts. Tanvir has featured in various TV programs, including The Sky at Night hosted by Sir Patrick Moore, and Horizon

#3117

Elihu Abrahams

#25180

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Elihu Abrahams was a theoretical physicist, specializing in condensed matter physics. Abrahams attended Brooklyn Technical High School, graduating in 1944. In 1947 Abrahams received his bachelor's degree and in 1952 his PhD, with Charles Kittel as thesis advisor, from the University of California, Berkeley with thesis Spin-lattice relaxation in ferromagnetics. In 1952–1953 he was a research associate in physics at UC Berkeley. He was in 1953–1955 a research associate and in 1955–1956 an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 1956 he became an assistant profess...

#3118

Abraham Skorka

#15780

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Abraham Skorka is an Argentine biophysicist, rabbi and book author. Abraham Skorka is rector emeritus of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, the rabbi of the Jewish community Benei Tikva, professor of biblical and rabbinic literature at the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano and honorary professor of Hebrew Law at the Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires.

#3119

John Winston Belcher

#74092

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

John Winston Belcher is a professor of physics emeritus holding the "Class of '22" professorship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Belcher's research interests are within the areas of space plasma physics. He was the principal investigator on the Voyager Plasma Science Experiment and is now a co-investigator on the Plasma Science Experiment on board the Voyager Interstellar Mission. Professor Belcher has twice received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, and received the 2016 Oersted Medal for his exceptional work in revolutionizing the Undergraduate Physics department at MIT by introducing novel teaching formats such as TEAL.

#3120

R. Bowen Loftin

R. Bowen Loftin

#20831

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Richard Bowen Loftin , better known as R. Bowen Loftin, is an American academic and physicist who was the 22nd Chancellor of the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Prior to his appointment as chancellor, he served as the 24th president of Texas A&M University.

#3121

Gavin Salam

#51262

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Gavin Phillip Salam, is a theoretical particle physicist and a senior research fellow at All Souls College as well as a senior member of staff at CERN in Geneva. His research investigates the strong interaction of Quantum Chromodynamics , the theory of quarks and gluons.

#3122

Stan Cowley

#92389

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Stanley William Herbert Cowley is a British physicist, emeritus Professor of Solar Planetary Physics at the University of Leicester. Career He was educated at Caludon Castle School, Coventry, and Imperial College, London, graduating with first class honours in physics in 1968. He was awarded a Ph.D by Imperial in 1972. He had a visiting Scholarship at the University of Colorado in 1972–73 before returning to Imperial, where he became a Lecturer in 1982, Reader in 1985 and Professor in 1988. He was appointed Head of the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group at Imperial in 1990 before moving in...

#3123

Marijn Franx

#69765

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Marijn Franx is a Dutch professor of astronomy at Leiden University. He was a winner of the 2010 Spinoza Prize. His research focuses on the formation and evolution of galaxies. He is involved with both the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes.

#3124

Alexander J. Wokaun

#95003

Overall Influence

#3125

David Whiffen

#82574

Overall Influence

1922 - 2002 (80 years)

David Hardy Whiffen FRS was an English physicist and pioneer of infrared and Electron Spin Resonance known for the "Whiffen Effect". Life He was born in Esher, Surrey into a family of chemical manufacturers and educated in Broadstairs, Kent and at Oundle. He gained a 1st Class Honours Degree at Oxford in 1943 under eminent physicist Sir Harold Warris Thompson and continued the pursuit of postgraduate research with Thompson until 1949. He worked in a number of areas including Radar and fuel analysis during the war.

#3126

Bob Coecke

#24087

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Bob Coecke is a Belgian theoretical physicist and logician who was professor of Quantum foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University until 2020, when he became Chief Scientist of Cambridge Quantum Computing, and after the merger with Honeywell Quantum Systems, Chief Scientist of Quantinuum. In January 2023 he also became Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He pioneered categorical quantum mechanics , Quantum Picturalism, ZX-calculus, DisCoCat model for natural language, and quantum natural language processing . He is a founder...

#3127

Erwin Marquit

#56272

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Erwin Marquit was an American physicist and Marxist philosopher. He was the principal founder of the Marxist Education Press and was editor of the Marxist studies journal Nature, Society, and Thought , making available works of Marxist scholarship, including contributions from European, African, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban scholars.

#3128

Gong Qihuang

#92213

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Gong Qihuang is a Chinese opticist and educator who is a professor and currently president of Peking University. Gong's research has been mainly in the field of nonlinear optics and spatiotemporal small-scale optics.

#3129

Samaya Nissanke

#89109

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Samaya Michiko Nissanke is an astrophysicist, associate professor in gravitational wave and multi-messenger astrophysics and the spokesperson for the GRAPPA Centre for Excellence in Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics at the University of Amsterdam. She works on gravitational-wave astrophysics and has played a founding role in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy. She played a leading role in the discovery paper of the first binary neutron star merger, GW170817, seen in gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.

#3130

Tor Hagfors

#42364

Overall Influence

1930 - 2007 (77 years)

Tor Hagfors was a Norwegian scientist, radio astronomer, radar expert and a pioneer in the studies of the interactions between electromagnetic waves and plasma. In the early 1960s he was one of a handful of pioneering theorists that independently developed a theory that explained the scattering of radio waves by the free electrons in a plasma and applied the result to the ionosphere. He became founding director of the new EISCAT facilities that were then under construction in 1975, by which time he already been director at most of the other incoherent scatter radar facilities in the world. Th...

#3131

Deborah Dultzin

#76651

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Deborah Dultzin Kessler is a Mexican astrophysicist specializing in quasars, blazars, active galactic nuclei, and supermassive black holes. She is a professor and researcher in the National Autonomous University of Mexico Institute of Astronomy.

#3132

Wolfgang Kaiser

#83696

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

Wolfgang Kaiser was a German physicist who worked in the fields of laser and solid-state physics. Biography Wolfgang Kaiser was born in Nürnberg on 17 July 1925. He was awarded his doctorate in Erlangen in 1952, worked as scientist at Purdue University, and in 1954, he joined the US Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth. From 1957 to 1964, Kaiser worked at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill. In 1964, he became a professor for experimental physics at the Technische Universität München, where he performed research on laser physics. Kaiser died on 20 October 2023, at the age ...

#3133

Benjamin Lax

#62360

Overall Influence

1915 - 2015 (100 years)

Benjamin Lax was a solid-state and plasma physicist. Biography Benjamin Lax immigrated in 1926 with his family to the United States. After secondary education at Brooklyn's Boys High School, he received in 1941 his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Cooper Union. After being drafted into the US Army in 1942, he was assigned to MIT's Radiation Laboratory to work on the development of radar. He received in 1949 from MIT his Ph.D. under Sanborn C. Brown with thesis The effect of magnetic field on the breakdown of gases at high frequencies.

#3134

Angela Olinto

#88995

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Angela Villela Olinto is an astroparticle physicist and the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago as well as the dean of the Physical Sciences Division. Her current work is focused on understanding the origin of high-energy cosmic rays, gamma rays, and neutrinos.

#3135

Jean – Philippe Bouchaud

#95146

Overall Influence

#3136

Hans-Jürgen Borchers

#65370

Overall Influence

1926 - 2011 (85 years)

Hans-Jürgen Borchers was a mathematical physicist at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen who worked on operator algebras and quantum field theory. He introduced Borchers algebras and the Borchers commutation relations and Borchers classes in quantum field theory. He was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 1994. Among his students is Jakob Yngvason.

#3137

Rubby Sherr

#45217

Overall Influence

1913 - 2013 (100 years)

Rubby Sherr was an American nuclear physicist who co-invented a key component of the first nuclear weapon while participating in the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. His academic career spanned nearly eight decades, including almost 40 years working at Princeton University.

#3138

Donald B. Campbell

#77266

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Donald B. Campbell is an Australian-born astronomer and Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty he was Director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico for seven years. Campbell's research work is in the general area of planetary studies with a concentration on the radio-wavelength-scattering properties of planets, planetary satellites, and small bodies. His work includes studies of Venus, the Moon, the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, Titan, as well as comets and asteroids. Campbell observed near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros, which was the first astero...

#3139

Takeshi Egami

#95225

Overall Influence

#3140

David Mervyn Blow

#30802

Overall Influence

1931 - 2004 (73 years)

David Mervyn Blow was an influential British biophysicist. He was best known for the development of X-ray crystallography, a technique used to determine the molecular structuress of tens of thousands of biological molecules. This has been extremely important to the pharmaceutical industry.

#3141

Michel Baranger

#78035

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Michel Jacques Louis Baranger was a Franco-American theoretical physicist. Baranger matriculated in 1945 at the École normale supérieure, Paris, graduating there in 1949. In 1951 he received from Cornell University his PhD under Hans Bethe with dissertation Relativistic Corrections to the Lamb shift. At Cornell University and then at Caltech from 1953 to 1955, he was also an assistant to Richard Feynman. In 1955 Baranger joined the physics department of Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he became an assistant professor in 1956 and a full professor in 1964. In 1969 he became a professor at MIT, where he retired as professor emeritus in 1997.

#3142

Wesley Smith

#94840

Overall Influence

Wesley H. Smith is the Bjorn Wiik Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he has taught since 1988. Before that he taught at Columbia University. Along with fellow physics professor Sau Lan Wu and math professor Terry Millar, he was “central to Wisconsin’s contribution to development of the Large Hadron Collider.”

#3143

Alexander Balankin

Alexander Balankin

#19065

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Alexander Balankin is a Mexican scientist of Russian origin whose work in the field of fractal mechanics and its engineering applications won him the UNESCO Science Prize in 2005. Currently he is a professor of physics at the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, Head of the Fractal Mechanics Group, and since 2003, a member of the Science Consulting Council of the Presidency of the Republic, Mexico.

#3144

Carlos Lousto

#82962

Overall Influence

Carlos O. Lousto is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences in Rochester Institute of Technology, known for his work on black hole collisions. Professional career Lousto is a Distinguished Professor in the RIT's School of Mathematical Sciences and co-director of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation. He holds two PhDs, one in Astronomy from the National University of La Plata, and one in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires , received in 1987 and 1992.

#3145

Jan Sładkowski

#35284

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jan Sładkowski is a Polish physicist. He is notable for his work on the role of exotic smoothness in cosmology, quantum game theory, and applications of thermodynamics in the theory of finance. Education He earned his PhD, under Marek Zrałek, and habilitation in theoretical physics from the University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. He has published a number of papers on quantum field theory, mathematical physics, quantum information processing, and econophysics.

#3146

Guy Deutscher

#24657

Overall Influence

Guy Deutscher is a professor emeritus of physics at Tel Aviv University, Israel. His area of research is experimental solid-state physics and superconductivity. He completed his dissertation under the direction of the theoretical physicist Pierre Gilles de Gennes at the University of Paris-Sud in 1967 as a member of "the Orsay group on superconductivity".

#3147

Derek Jeffrey Raine

#95342

Overall Influence

#3148

Chris Ferrie

#45857

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Chris Ferrie is a Canadian physicist, mathematician, researcher, and children's book author. Ferrie studied at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario Canada, where he earned a BSc in mathematical physics, a masters in applied mathematics, and a PhD in applied mathematics on Theory and Applications of Probability in Quantum Mechanics from the Institute for Quantum Computing and University of Waterloo.

#3149

Wolfgang Kabsch

#95369

Overall Influence

#3150

Egor Babaev

#90798

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Egor Babaev is a Russian-born Swedish physicist. In 2001, he received his PhD in theoretical physics from Uppsala University . In 2006 he joined the faculty of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 2007-2013 he shared this position with a faculty appointment at Physics Department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst . He is currently full professor at the Physics Department KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

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