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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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#3301

Paolo Verdecchia

#98151

Overall Influence

#3302

Vito Latora

#58260

Overall Influence

Vito Latora is an Italian physicist, currently Professor in Applied Mathematics at the School of Mathematical Sciences of the Queen Mary University of London. He is known for his works on complex systems, in particular on the structure and dynamics of complex networks.

#3303

Daryl Haggard

#93874

Overall Influence

Daryl Haggard is an American-Canadian astronomer and associate professor of physics in the Department of Physics at McGill University and the McGill Space Institute. Early life and education Haggard was born in Seattle, Washington, the fifth of eight children, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico at 6 months of age. Haggard's father was a mathematician and college professor. Her mother trained as biologist and owns a native plant nursery in Santa Fe.

#3304

Jan Kleyna

#42867

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Jan T. Kleyna is a postdoctoral astronomy researcher at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy. His area of interest is galaxy dynamics, and he has worked to develop codes for the real-time detection of moving objects such as Jovian satellites. He has also co-discovered several of Saturn's moons.

#3305

Stephen Smartt

#79763

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Stephen J. Smartt is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who specialises in stellar evolution, supernovae and time domain sky surveys. He is credited with the discovery of stars that explode as supernovae, measuring their mass, luminosity and the chemical elements synthesized. Smartt is a Professor of Astrophysics at the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen's University Belfast. He is a patron of Northern Ireland Humanists.

#3306

Hugh Couchman

#90589

Overall Influence

Hugh Couchman is a Canadian astronomer and professor at McMaster University. He is a computational astrophysicist who studies the growth of structure in the universe via gravitational N-body simulations.

#3307

Vladimir Petrovich Mineev

#77911

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Vladimir Petrovich Mineev is a Russian theoretical physicist, specializing in condensed matter physics. Biography Mineev graduated in 1969 from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and then became a graduate student at Moscow's Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. There in 1974 he received his Russian Candidate of Sciences degree and in 1983 his Russian Doctor of Sciences degree . At the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics, he was a researcher from 1972 to 1991 and a vice-director from 1992 to 1999, as well as holding a chair in theoretical physics from 1991 to 1999. In 1993 and 1994 he organized Landau Institute summer schools.

#3308

Dipankar Banerjee

#81683

Overall Influence

Dipankar Banerjee is an Indian solar physicist. He is Professor of Solar Physics at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and currently serves as the director of the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences .

#3309

Reta Beebe

#80274

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Reta F. Beebe is an American astronomer, author, and popularizer of astronomy. She is an expert on the planets Jupiter and Saturn, and the author of Jupiter: The Giant Planet. She is a professor emeritus in the Astronomy Department at New Mexico State University and 2010 winner of the NASA Exceptional Public Service medal.

#3310

Pavel Exner

#57318

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Pavel Exner is a Czech mathematical physicist. Life Born on March 30, 1946, in Prague, his parents were Vilem Exner, economist, and Marie, born Karvankova, ophthalmologist. He graduated in 1969 in theoretical physics from the Charles University in Prague.

#3311

Wanda Díaz-Merced

#72782

Overall Influence

Wanda Díaz-Merced is an astronomer best known for using sonification to turn large data sets into audible sound. She currently works at the European Gravitational Observatory Cascina, Italy. As someone who has lost their eyesight, she is a leader in increasing equality of access to astronomy and using audible sound to study astrophysical data. Wanda has been included in the list of the 7 most trailblazing women in science by the BBC.

#3312

Riichiro Saito

#98284

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

#3313

George V. Eleftheriades

#57210

Overall Influence

George V. Eleftheriades is a researcher in the field of metamaterials. He has been endowed with a Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto and is a professor in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering there. He has received notable awards for his achievements, is a fellow of the IEEE and the Royal Society of Canada.

#3314

Vinayak P. Dravid

#98298

Overall Influence

#3315

André Brahic

#57123

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

André Fernand Brahic was a French astrophysicist. He is known for his discovery of the rings of Neptune. Biography Brahic was born in 1942 in Paris. His family originated from the coal mining village of Petit-Brahic in the Banne commune of southern France. Brahic had stated that many of his ancestors died of silicosis, but his father quit the mines to work for the railway industry.

#3316

Ryoichi Kikuchi

#98338

Overall Influence

#3317

Moty Heiblum

#24696

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Mordehai "Moty" Heiblum is an Israeli electrical engineer and condensed matter physicist, known for his research in mesoscopic physics. Biography Moty Heiblum was born and raised in Holon. His mother was the only Holocaust survivor in her immediate family, and most of his father's family perished in the Holocaust. From 1967 to 1971 Moty Heiblum served in the Israeli Defense Force in the IDF Communications Corps and was an instructor at the IDF Air Force Technical School. Heiblum graduated in electrical engineering from the Technion with a bachelor's degree in 1973 and from Carnegie-Mellon University with a master's degree in 1974.

#3318

Deepak Mathur

#62343

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Deepak Mathur is an Indian molecular and atomic physicist and was a Distinguished Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He has been the J C Bose National Fellow at the Department of Atomic and Molecular Physics at Manipal Academy of Higher Education and Founding Director of the UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Science at the University of Mumbai. Known for his research on molecular and biological physics, Mathur is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and The World Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Indust...

#3319

C. B. Collins

#54876

Overall Influence

Christopher Barry Collins is a cosmologist who has written many papers with Stephen Hawking. He is a professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo. Collins earned his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of F. Gerard Friedlander. Among his works with Hawking is a 1973 paper that uses the anthropic principle to provide a solution to the flatness problem.

#3320

Michael F. Toney

#98366

Overall Influence

#3321

Augusto Sagnotti

Augusto Sagnotti

#78973

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Augusto Sagnotti is an Italian theoretical physicist at Scuola Normale . Biography Sagnotti earned a Laurea in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1978 ; and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Caltech in 1983 . He was Post-Doctoral Fellow at Caltech and Miller Research Fellow at U.C. Berkeley .

#3322

Colin Pask

#36952

Overall Influence

Colin Pask is a British mathematical physicist and science writer. Life He was born in Great Gonerby, on the outskirts of Grantham in Lincolnshire, where his father was a dairy farmer. He was educated at King's School, Grantham from age 11, and went to Queen Mary College, London for a degree course in theoretical physics and mathematics. He graduated B.Sc. there in 1964.

#3323

Carel S. Scholten

#25726

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Carel S. Scholten was a physicist and a pioneer of computing. He went to the Vossius Gymnasium in Amsterdam and then studied physics from 1945 to 1952 at the University of Amsterdam. In 1947 he was asked by the Dutch Mathematisch Centrum to collaborate in building an automatic calculator with his friend and fellow student Bram Loopstra. Their first system, the ARRA I was not a success, but its successor, the ARRA II, on which Gerrit Blaauw also collaborated, was.

#3324

Karen Hallberg

#41567

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Karen Astrid Hallberg is an Argentine scientist and professor of physics at the Balseiro Institute. and at the Bariloche Atomic Centre. Se was awarded the 2019 L'Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science Laureate.

#3325

Lorenzo Iorio

#90953

Overall Influence

Lorenzo Iorio, born in Bari in, is an Italian physicist working in general relativity, gravitation and related topics in astronomy and astrophysics. Biography Iorio is editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Universe, published by MDPI. In May 2019, he qualified as a full professor in Astronomy, Astrophysics, Physics of the Earth and Planets, and Theoretical Physics. In September 2019, he qualified as an associate professor in the same fields. Iorio is a member of the International Astronomical Union.

#3326

Harold Hopkins

#12460

Overall Influence

1918 - 1994 (76 years)

Harold Horace Hopkins FRS was a British physicist. His Wave Theory of Aberrations, , is central to all modern optical design and provides the mathematical analysis which enables the use of computers to create the highest quality lenses. In addition to his theoretical work, his many inventions are in daily use throughout the world. These include zoom lenses, coherent fibre-optics and more recently the rod-lens endoscopes which 'opened the door' to modern key-hole surgery. He was the recipient of many of the world's most prestigious awards and was twice nominated for a Nobel Prize. His citation...

#3327

John Pethica

#44778

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Sir John Bernard Pethica, is a British chemist and Science Foundation Ireland professor of material science at Trinity College, Dublin, Chief Scientific Advisor at the UK's National Physical Laboratory, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. Pethica is most noted for his work on the development of nanoindentation and atom resolution atomic force microscopy.

#3328

Antonio Ereditato

Antonio Ereditato

#85231

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Antonio Ereditato is an Italian physicist, currently Research Professor at the University of Chicago, associate researcher at Fermilab, Batavia, USA, and Emeritus professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he has been Director of the Laboratory for High Energy Physics from 2006 to 2020. From 2021 to 2022 Ereditato has been Visiting Professor at the Yale University, USA. He carried out research activities in the field of experimental neutrino physics, of weak interactions and strong interactions with experiments conducted at CERN, in Japan, at Fermilab in United States and at the LNGS in Italy.

#3329

Scott Diddams

#97559

Overall Influence

Scott Diddams is a professor adjoint in the physics department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is attached to the Optical Frequency Measurements Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology based in Boulder, Colorado. Part of his work there includes research towards increasing the accuracy of the atomic clock.

#3330

Siva Sivananthan

Siva Sivananthan

#37717

Overall Influence

Professor Sivalingam Sivananthan is an American academic, scientist, businessman and Director of the Microphysics Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Early life and family Sivananthan was born in Madduvil South near Chavakachcheri in northern Ceylon. His father was a Tamil scholar from Valvettithurai and his mother was teacher of religion and science. He was educated at Saraswathi Maha Vidyalayam, Drieberg College and Jaffna Hindu College . After school he joined the University of Peradeniya's Science Faculty in 1976, graduating in 1980 with a BS degree in physics.

#3331

Gary Westfall

#91785

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gary D. Westfall is an American experimental nuclear and high energy physicist and University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. He is also a co-author, with Wolfgang Bauer, of the introductory calculus-based physics textbook University Physics, published by McGraw-Hill in 2010.

#3332

Jean Zinn-justin

#98557

Overall Influence

#3333

Michel Devoret

#38597

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Michel Devoret is a French physicist and F. W. Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics at Yale University. He also holds a position as the Director of the Applied Physics Nanofabrication Lab at Yale. He is known for his pioneering work on macroscopic quantum tunneling, and the single-electron pump as well as in groundbreaking contributions to initiating the fields of circuit quantum electrodynamics and quantronics.

#3334

Liao Shijun

#37791

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Liao Shijun is a fluid mechanics and applied mathematics expert working in homotopy analysis method , nonlinear wavess, nonlinear dynamics, and applied mathematics. He was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Liao is a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

#3335

Robert Myers

#67286

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Robert C. Myers is a Canadian theoretical physicist who specializes in black holes, string theory and quantum entanglement. Career Myers is Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. where he holds the BMO Financial Group Isaac Newton Chair in Theoretical Physics. He served as Perimeter Institute's Faculty Chair from 2011 to 2018. He is also an Adjunct Professor of physics at the University of Waterloo.

#3336

Freddy Cachazo

#56395

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Freddy Alexander Cachazo is a Venezuelan-born theoretical physicist who holds the Gluskin Sheff Freeman Dyson Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

#3337

J. Murdoch Ritchie

#86769

Overall Influence

1925 - 2008 (83 years)

Joseph Murdoch Ritchie was a Scottish born American biophysicist and a professor at Yale University. Early life and education Ritchie studied mathematics and physics at the University of Aberdeen, then did his doctorate at University College, London in biophysics in 1952.

#3338

John Gallagher III

#78695

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

John S. Gallagher III is an American astronomer and an expert on star formation in external galaxies, dwarf galaxies and dark matter. He is the William Morgan Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he has been a professor since 1991.

#3339

Lee Anne Willson

#86296

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Lee Anne Willson is an American astronomer. Early life and education Lee Anne Willson was born on March 14, 1947, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Willson was interested in science from an early age. The daughter of a scientist, she spent her youth reading science fiction books. Her junior year of high school, she wanted to be an astronaut but she realized that this dream was impractical because she had poor vision, a crooked knee, and was female. Because she still wanted to learn about space, she decided that she wanted to be an astronomer instead.

#3340

Paul Mockapetris

Paul Mockapetris

#4357

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Paul V. Mockapetris is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, who invented the Internet Domain Name System . Education Mockapetris graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1966, received his bachelor's degrees in physics and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971 and his doctorate in information and computer science from the University of California at Irvine in 1982.

#3341

Sumathi Rao

#44009

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Sumathi Rao is an Indian theoretical physicist and professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru, working in the field of condensed matter physics. She is a former member of women in physics promotion of International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 2000 to 2008.

#3342

Ramanath Cowsik

#64596

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Ramanath Cowsik is an Indian astrophysicist and the James S. McDonnell Professor of Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He is considered by many as the father of astroparticle physics. A recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, Cowsik was honored by the Government of India, in 2002, with the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri

#3343

Flemming Besenbacher

#98804

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

#3344

Peter Kramer

#39240

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Peter Kramer is a German physicist. Personal life Kramer studied physics at the University of Münster, the University of Tübingen, the University of Bristol and the University of Marburg. He received his PhD in 1964 in Marburg and in 1968 his Habilitation in Tübingen. He was a postdoc at the UNAM in Mexico City, where he collaborated with Marcos Moshinsky. He was a professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Tübingen from 1970 until 1998 when he retired. He has also served as a Dean and a Vice President at the University of Tübingen. Kramer married in 1962 and has two children.

#3345

Heather A. Knutson

Heather A. Knutson

#84520

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Heather A. Knutson is an astrophysicist and professor at California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Her research is focused on the study of exoplanets, their composition and formation. She won the American Astronomical Society's Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy for her work in exoplanetary atmospheres.

#3346

David R. Nygren

David R. Nygren

#62779

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

David Robert Nygren is a particle physicist known for his invention of the time projection chamber. He is a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Arlington now. He has worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1973. He has been called "the most distinguished developer of particle detection instruments in the country".

#3347

Richard Geller

#78179

Overall Influence

1927 - 2007 (80 years)

Richard Geller was an experimental nuclear and plasma physicist. He was born on Monday, 25 April 1927, in Vienna and died on Sunday, 1 July 2007, at the age of 80, in Grenoble. Geller received his undergraduate degree from the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris and his Doctorat en Sciences, under Prof. F. Perrin from the Sorbonne . He was hired in 1948 by F. Joliot Curie to work at Commissariat à l'énergie atomique and remained there until leaving in 1992, with the exception of a sabbatical at Stanford University , where, as a research associate, he developed the first bumpy t...

#3348

Marileen Dogterom

Marileen Dogterom

#48569

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Marileen Dogterom is a Dutch biophysicist and professor at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology. She published in Science, Cell, and Nature and is notable for her research of the cell cytoskeleton. For this research, she was awarded the 2018 Spinoza Prize.

#3349

Bernard Sadoulet

#96717

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Bernard Sadoulet is a French physicist. Sadoulet studied from 1963 to 1965 at the École polytechnique and received his doctorate in 1971 at University of Paris-Sud in Orsay. From 1966 to 1973 he worked at CERN and from 1976 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was involved in the design of the UA1 detector at CERN.

#3350

Michael Reiss

#21496

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Michael J. Reiss is a British bioethicist, educator, and journalist. He is also an Anglican priest. Reiss is professor of science education at the Institute of Education, University College London, where he is assistant director, research and development.

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