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,

#3401

Ragbir Bhathal

#50906

Overall Influence

Ragbir Bhathal was an Australian astronomer and author, based at the Western Sydney University , Australia. He was known for his work on Optical Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence . He continued lecturing and research at WSU until he died at the age of 86 on 30 November 2022.

#3402

Tahir Hussain

#82459

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Tahir Hussain , was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and an emeritus professor of physics at the Government College University whose research was engaged in understanding the particle accelerator. Biography Hussain was born in 1923 in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh in the British Indian Empire. He did his graduation in physics from the Aligarh Muslim University , and earned MSc in physics with honours. At the invitation of the Governor-General of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1948, he emigrated to Pakistan along with Dr. R.M. Chaudhry, accepting a teaching position as laboratory lecturer at the Government College University in Lahore at the behest of R.M.

#3403

Alan Astbury

#43901

Overall Influence

1934 - 2014 (80 years)

Alan Astbury was a Canadian physicist, emeritus professor at the University of Victoria, and director of the Tri-Universities Meson Facility laboratory. Early life and education He was born in Crewe, England, to Jane and Harold Astbury. His mother worked in a bakery and his father was an engineer for the Co-op Dairy. He went to Nantwich and Acton Grammar School. Although he was a good cricketer and footballer - he played for Crewe Schoolboys along with Chelsea and England player Frank Blunstone - his parents discouraged a career in football.

#3404

Charles Bailyn

#76022

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Charles David Bailyn is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University and inaugural dean of faculty at Yale-NUS College. Education He earned a B.S. in astronomy and physics from Yale in 1981 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1987. His Ph.D. thesis on X-ray emitting binary stars received the Robert J. Trumpler Award for best North American Ph.D. thesis in astronomy.

#3405

Yaroslav Blanter

Yaroslav Blanter

#53211

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Yaroslav Mikhaylovich Blanter is a Russian physicist, an expert in the field of extractive metallurgy and condensed matter physics. As of 2011, he is the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek professor at the Delft University of Technology.

#3406

Giacinto Scoles

#88331

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Giacinto Scoles is a European and North American chemist and physicist who is best known for his pioneering development of molecular beam methods for the study of weak van der Waals forces between atoms, molecules, and surfaces. He developed the cryogenic bolometer as a universal detector of atomic and molecule beams that not only can detect a small flux of molecules, but also responds to the internal energy of the molecules. This is the basis for the optothermal spectroscopy technique which Scoles and others have used to obtain very high signal-to noise and high resolution ro-vibrational ...

#3407

John Charlton Polkinghorne

#99821

Overall Influence

#3408

Julio Gea-Banacloche

#38685

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Julio Gea-Banacloche is professor of physics and currently the head of the department of physics at the University of Arkansas. He is notable for his contribution to the field of quantum information, where he has shown that the quantum mechanical nature of the fields used to manipulate the quantum information carriers themselves might lead to unpredictable errors in the performance of the quantum logical operations. The lower bound on the size of these errors can be made smaller by increasing the energy of the control system. This has led Gea-Banacloche to predict a minimum energy requiremen...

#3409

Egbert Kankeleit

Egbert Kankeleit

#85203

Overall Influence

1929 - 2022 (93 years)

Egbert Kankeleit was a German nuclear physicist. Early life and education Egbert Kankeleit was born in Hamburg, Germany on 16 April 1929, as the son of Otto Kankeleit and Margarete Kankeleit . He studied nuclear physics in Munich and earned his doctorate in 1961 as one of Heinz Maier-Leibniz’s group. After that he went to Caltech in Pasadena in the role of Senior Research Fellow. From there he followed a call to TH Darmstadt, where he remained until his retirement in 1997.

#3410

Constantin Piron

#43954

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

Constantin Piron was a Belgian physicist who worked for most of his career in Switzerland. In 1963 Piron earned his doctor of science degree from the University of Lausanne under the direction of Ernst Stueckelberg and Josef-Maria Jauch with a thesis on quantum logic, "Axiomatique quantique". He developed Jauch's methods for the foundations of quantum mechanics.

#3411

Cornelis Dirk Andriesse

Cornelis Dirk Andriesse

#64078

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Cornelis Dirk Andriesse is a Dutch physicist, writer and historian of science. Internationally he is best known for his scientific biography of Christiaan Huygens. Education Andriesse studied applied physics at Delft University of Technology, where he specialized in radiation physics. In 1969 he received his PhD degree from the same university with a thesis on the scattering of neutrons in gaseous argon-36. After that, he initiated a research project on the force between noble gas atoms.

#3412

Ralf Klessen

#99889

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Ralf Stephan Klessen is a German astronomer. He is a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, part of the Center for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and is currently the Managing Director of the Institute, as well as a Deputy Director of the Center for Astronomy.

#3413

Ingolf Lindau

#83883

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Evert Ingolf Lindau is a Swedish physicist and professor emeritus at Lund University and Stanford University and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Biography Lindau was awarded his PhD in 1971 at Chalmers University of Technology with his dissertation about photoemission and optical absorption studies of the band structure. After the dissertation, he began working at the Silicon Valley-based company Varian Associates in Palo Alto between 1971 and 1972 before he was employed at Stanford University in 1972. In 1973 he obtained the first X-ray photoemission spectra of the 4f levels of gold.

#3414

Bienvenido Nebres

#12913

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Bienvenido F. Nebres is a Filipino scientist, mathematician, and a Jesuit priest who was the longest-serving university president of the Ateneo de Manila University. He succeeded Joaquin G. Bernas in 1993, and served as University President until 1 June 2011. He currently sits as a member of the board of trustees of Georgetown University, Regis University, St. Edward School Foundation, Inc., the Asian Institute of Management , and other colleges and universities in the Philippines. He is also a member of the board of directors of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company, and is currently chairman of the Synergeia Foundation.

#3415

Rachel Mandelbaum

#89017

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Rachel Mandelbaum is a professor of astrophysics at Carnegie Mellon University, studying cosmology and galactic evolution with a focus on dark matter and dark energy. Much of her work has used the phenomenon of gravitational lensing of galaxies and she has made significant improvements in the calibration of lensing parameters.

#3416

Michael A'Hearn

Michael A'Hearn

#64538

Overall Influence

1940 - 2017 (77 years)

Michael Francis A'Hearn was an American astronomer and astronomy professor at the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He was also the principal investigator for NASA's EPOXI mission.

#3417

Morteza Gharib

#47627

Overall Influence

Morteza Gharib is the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bio-Inspired Engineering at Caltech. Gharib was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for contributions to fluid flow diagnostics and imagery, and engineering of bioinspired devices and phenomena.

#3418

Efthimios Kaxiras

#100035

Overall Influence

#3419

Malcolm Jobling

#100052

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

#3420

Edwin Power

#56766

Overall Influence

1928 - 2004 (76 years)

Edwin Albert Power was an English physicist and an emeritus professor of applied mathematics at University College London. He made several contributions to the field of non-relativistic quantum electrodynamics.

#3421

Alvin Martin Weinberg

#100058

Overall Influence

#3422

Jean-Philippe Uzan

#88926

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Jean-Philippe Uzan is a French cosmologist and directeur de recherche employed by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique . Education and career In 1987 Uzan graduated from secondary school with the degree Baccalauréat C with honours. From 1987 to 1990 he studied at Lycée Saint-Louis to prepare for competitive scientific examinations. From 1990 to 1993 he studied in the Engineering School of the École des Mines de Paris. There he graduated in 1993 with a civil engineering degree with specialisation in Earth science. From 1993 to 1994 he did his French military service as a cooperant doing research at the Institutet for rymdfysik .

#3423

Hans Scholl

#69100

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Hans Scholl is a German astronomer, who worked at the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut in Heidelberg, Germany, and at the Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice, France. In 1999, he was part of a team that discovered three moons of Uranus: Prospero, Setebos and Stephano. He has also co-discovered 55 minor planets together with Italian astronomer Andrea Boattini at ESO's La Silla Observatory site in northern Chile during 2003–2005.

#3424

Werner Israel

#100078

Overall Influence

#3425

Rafael Rebolo López

Rafael Rebolo López

#88938

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Rafael Rebolo López is a Spanish astrophysicist. In October 2013 he became the director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias . He is a professor at the Spanish National Research Council. In 2002 Rebolo became an external professor at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and a member of the Max Planck Society.

#3426

Beatriz Barbuy

#85777

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Beatriz Leonor Silveira Barbuy is a Brazilian astrophysicist. She was described in 2009 by Época magazine as one of the 100 most influential Brazilians. She is a professor at the Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas at the University of São Paulo, vice-president of the International Astronomical Union , and one of five winners of the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2009.

#3427

Judith Young

#61804

Overall Influence

1952 - 2014 (62 years)

Judith Sharn Young was an American physicist, astronomer, and educator. The American Physical Society honored Young with the first Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for being the best young physicist in the world in 1986. Astronomer Nick Scoville of Caltech writes of her research: "Her pioneering galactic structure research included some of the earliest mapping of CO emission in galaxies followed by the most extensive surveys molecular gas and star formation in nearby galaxies."

#3428

Rolf Gruetter

#40197

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Rolf Gruetter is a Swiss physicist and neurobiologist specialized in magnetic resonance, biomedical imaging and brain metabolism. He is a professor of physics at EPFL and the head of the Laboratory Functional and Metabolic Imaging at the School of Basic Sciences.

#3429

Michel Gaudin

#62753

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Michel Gaudin was a French physicist, known for the Gaudin model, in which a central spin is coupled to many surrounding spins. After graduating with the degree of ingénieur des ponts et chaussées , Gaudin joined in 1956 the CEA in Saclay to work on neutron experiments. Two years later, he joined Claude Bloch's theorists' working group, to which he belonged for the rest of his career. In 1967 he received from the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay his doctoral degree in physics with thesis Étude d'un modèle à une dimension pour un système de fermions en interaction. Gaudin's research deals with...

#3430

Yoram J. Kaufman

#100154

Overall Influence

#3431

Gunnar Fant

#100156

Overall Influence

#3432

Daniel Harlow

#82399

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Daniel Harlow is the Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Biography Harlow was born in Cincinnati and grew up in Boston and Chicago. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 2006 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2012. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and Harvard University before joining MIT's faculty in July 2017.

#3433

Michael C. Kelley

#100169

Overall Influence

#3434

Michael Mackey

#73647

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael C. Mackey is a Canadian-American biomathematician and Professor in the Department of Physiology of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada who holds the Joseph Morley Drake Emeritus Chair.

#3435

Norio Kaifu

#61720

Overall Influence

1943 - 2019 (76 years)

was a Japanese astronomer. He was best known as the president of the International Astronomical Union from 2012 to 2015. He directed the Subaru telescope project, which housed the largest monolithic primary mirror in the world from its commission until 2005. Kaifu researched in radio astronomy, extragalactic astronomy, cosmic magnetic fields, non-stable stars, and infrared astronomy. The minor planet 6412 Kaifu is named in his honor.

#3436

Paul Fenter

#42908

Overall Influence

Paul Fenter is a senior physicist and leader for Interfacial Processes Group, in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the former director of the Center for Electrochemical Energy Science , a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center.

#3437

John Hartnett

#93890

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

John G. Hartnett , is an Australian young Earth creationist and cosmologist. He has been active with Creation Ministries International and is known for his opposition to the Big Bang theory and criticism of the dark matter and dark energy hypotheses.

#3438

Hannspeter Winter

#43867

Overall Influence

1941 - 2006 (65 years)

Hannspeter Winter was an Austrian plasma physicist who did research on hollow atoms and held a full professorship at the TU Wien. He won the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class in 2001 and the prestigious German Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize in 2003. He was co-editor of Europhysics Letters, Heavy Ion Physics, Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion and has published approximately 270 peer-reviewed papers in international scientific journals. He was married to the Austrian judge Renate Winter.

#3439

Gerhard Neukum

#96483

Overall Influence

1944 - 2014 (70 years)

Gerhard Neukum was a German planetary scientist who worked on the chronology of solar system bodies. He obtained a Ph.D. in physics at the Heidelberg University. He was a professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at the Free University of Berlin.

#3440

Eric Fossum

#11651

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

#3441

Herbert Ackland Pohl

#100353

Overall Influence

#3442

Seth Putterman

#79881

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Seth J. Putterman is an American physicist. He is known to have an eclectic approach to research topics that broadly revolves around energy-focusing phenomena in nonlinear, continuous systems, with particular interest in turbulence, sonoluminescence, sonofusion and pyrofusion.

#3443

Panayotis G. Kevrekidis

#61925

Overall Influence

Panayotis G. Kevrekidis is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kevrekidis earned his B.Sc. in physics in 1996 from the University of Athens. He obtained his M.S. in 1998 and Ph.D. in 2000 from Rutgers University, the latter under the joint supervision of Joel Lebowitz and Panos G. Georgopoulos. His thesis was entitled “Lattice Dynamics of Solitary Wave Excitations”. He then assumed a post-doctoral position split between the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics of Princeton University and the Theoretical Division and the Center for Nonlinear Studies of Los Alamos National Laboratory .

#3444

Tamara Davis

#76689

Overall Influence

Tamara Maree Davis is an Australian astrophysicist. , she is a professor in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland, where she has been employed since 2008. The Australian Academy of Science awarded her their Nancy Millis Medal in 2015, and she was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2018,. She received the Astronomical Society of Australia's Louise Webster Prize in 2009, and their Robert Ellery Lectureship in 2021. She became a Member of the Order of Australia in 2020.

#3445

Wolfgang Wernsdorfer

#100478

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

#3446

Sarbani Basu

#86854

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Sarbani Basu is an Indian astrophysicist and Professor at Yale University. She is on the board of directors of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#3447

Claudius Gros

#80119

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Claudius Gros is a German physicist. He is a professor of theoretical physics in Goethe University Frankfurt since 2005. He specializes in computational neurosciences and complex systems theory. Career Finishing his studies in physics 1985 at the ETH Zürich with a thesis on heavy Fermions, Gros continued for a PhD in theoretical solid-state physics. Using projected wave functions, as introduced originally by Martin Gutzwiller, he and his advisor, Thomas Maurice Rice, were able to predict d-wave superconductivity for high-temperature superconductors.

#3448

Oded Aharonson

#92525

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Oded Aharonson is Israeli planetary scientist, professor at Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Weizmann Institute. Aharonson was a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, until he moved in 2012 to the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. He has participated in many NASA flight missions, including Mars Global Surveyor, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, the Mars Exploration Rovers, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

#3449

Dibyendu Nandi

#76108

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Dibyendu Nandi is an Indian space scientist known for his research related to Solar Magnetic Cycle, solar dynamic activity and its influence on Space Weather. Nandi is currently the head of the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences, India or CESSI at IISER Kolkata. He is associated with Montana State University, Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian and IISER Kolkata where he carried most of his research work.

#3450

Noboru Toda

#100554

Overall Influence

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