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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#3501

Kunio Okuda

#101190

Overall Influence

#3502

Brian Orr

#70646

Overall Influence

Brian J. Orr is an Australian scientist known for various experimental and theoretical contributions to molecular and optical physics, including laser spectroscopy and optical parametric oscillators.

#3503

Michael H. Hart

#25224

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Michael H. Hart is an American astrophysicist, author, researcher, and white separatist/white nationalist. Since 1978, he has published five books, most notably of the best-selling work, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History.

#3504

Joseph Veverka

#83002

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Joseph Veverka is the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences, professor of Astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research area is in planetary sciences, with a focus on physical studies of satellite surfaces and planetary rings. Veverka was the principal investigator on the NASA Discovery Program mission CONTOUR, a co-investigator of the Deep Impact space mission to Comet Tempel 1, and is the principal investigator on the NASA Discovery Mission of Opportunity, Stardust-NeXT. He is the recipient of the 2001 National Air and Space Museum Trophy and has the asteroid 271...

#3505

Richard M. Noyes

#73159

Overall Influence

1919 - 1997 (78 years)

Richard Macy Noyes was an American physical chemist. Family Noyes was born April 6, 1919, in Champaign, Illinois, to the American chemist William Noyes and his third wife Katherine Macy, daughter of Jesse Macy. His older half-brother was Albert and his brother Pierre ; both were chemists.

#3506

Bretislav Friedrich

#49780

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Bretislav Friedrich is a Research Group leader at the Department of Molecular Physics, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and Honorarprofessor at the Technische Universität in Berlin, Germany. He is globally recognized for his pioneering research surrounding interaction of molecules with and in electric, magnetic, and optical fields as well as on cold molecules. He was admitted to the Learned Society of the Czech Republic in 2011.

#3507

George Karagiannidis

#89332

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

George K. Karagiannidis is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a director of Digital Telecommunications Systems and Networks Laboratory. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 "for contributions to the performance analysis of wireless communication systems".

#3508

Ivet Bahar

#37004

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Ivet Bahar is a Turkish-American computational biologist, currently serving as the Director of the Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, Louis & Beatrice Laufer Endowed Chair and Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the Stony Brook University, School of Medicine. Before joining Stony Brook University, she served as Distinguished Professor, John K. Vries Chair and Founder of the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine , and as Assistant , Associate and Full Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey.

#3509

Leopoldo Máximo Falicov

#89656

Overall Influence

1933 - 1995 (62 years)

Leopoldo Máximo Falicov was an Argentine theoretical physicist, specializing in the theory of condensed matter physics. Life Falicov was born in Buenos Aires with both parents of Eastern European Jewish origin. His father, Isaías Félix Falicov, was Argentine and his mother, Dora Samoilovich, emigrated to Argentina as a child.

#3510

James Philip Elliott

#87769

Overall Influence

1929 - 2008 (79 years)

James Philip "Phil" Elliott was a British theoretical nuclear physicist. Life Elliott studied at the University of Southampton, where he graduated in physics in 1949 and received his doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics under Hermann Arthur Jahn. From 1951 he was in the theory department of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell. First he worked on neutron transport in reactors before turning to the core structure. In cooperation with the head of the theory department Brian Flowers, fundamental work was carried out in the 1950s that helped to unite the shell model with collective models of the core structure.

#3511

Lynda Soderholm

#42575

Overall Influence

Lynda Soderholm is a physical chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory with a specialty in f-block elements. She is a senior scientist and the lead of the Actinide, Geochemistry & Separation Sciences Theme within Argonne's Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division. Her specific role is the Separation Science group leader within Heavy Element Chemistry and Separation Science , directing basic research focused on low-energy methods for isolating lanthanide and actinide elements from complex mixtures. She has made fundamental contributions to understanding f-block ...

#3512

Peter Michelson

#87797

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Peter F. Michelson is an American physicist who focuses on high energy astrophysics, particularly X-ray and gamma-ray observations and instrument development. He is currently the Luke Blossom Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University.

#3513

David J Kwiatkowski

#101412

Overall Influence

#3514

Jacques Beckers

#70344

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Jacques Maurice Beckers was a Dutch-born American astronomer. He was director of the National Solar Observatory between 1993 and 1998. Beckers worked mainly in the field of astrophysics and astronomical optometry.

#3515

William Carl Lineberger

#82248

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

William Carl Lineberger is an American chemist. A native of Hamlet, North Carolina, William Carl Lineberger was born to parents Caleb Henry and Evelyn Pelot Cooper Lineberger on December 5, 1939. His mother was a former teacher and his father was a railroad worker. Through his mother, Lineberger is of French Huguenot descent. As a child, Lineberger was a Boy Scout and made Eagle rank. After completing his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Lineberger began teaching at his alma mater, leaving for a research position at the U. S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory and later the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.

#3516

Peter Franken

#58769

Overall Influence

1928 - 1999 (71 years)

Peter A. Franken was an American physicist who contributed to the field of nonlinear optics. He was president of the Optical Society of America in 1977. In 1961, Professor Peter Franken and his coworkers in the Randall Laboratory at the University of Michigan observed for the first time the second-harmonic generation. This event launched a golden age in optical physics that has led to applications in fields ranging from optical communications and biological imaging to X-ray generation and homeland security. In 1985 he contributed an oral history to the American Institute of Physics in which h...

#3517

David MacAdam

#25757

Overall Influence

1910 - 1998 (88 years)

David Lewis MacAdam was an American physicist and color scientist who made important contributions to color science and technology in the fields of colorimetry, color discrimination, color photography and television, and color order.

#3518

James E. Faller

#73277

Overall Influence

James E. Faller was an American physicist and inventor who specialized in the field of gravity. He conceived the Lunar Laser Ranging Program, the goal of which, was to fire high powered laser beams at special retroreflectors placed on the Moon by Apollo program Astronauts. He invented a gravity motion sensor, called the Absolute Gravimeter, which is sensitive enough to detect changes in the local gravitational field due to a person's mass. His work was featured in many books and magazines, such as National Geographic. In 2001, his gravity detection device was featured on the Science Channel in the show Head Rush and was used to debunk anti-gravity devices that were for sale on the market.

#3519

Michele Limon

#83368

Overall Influence

Michele Limon is an Italian research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Limon studied physics at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Milan, Italy and completed his post-doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been conducting research for more than 30 years and has experience in the design of ground, balloon and space-based instrumentation. His academic specialties include Astrophysics, Cosmology, Instrumentation Development, and Cryogenics.

#3520

Andrew Collier Cameron

#100056

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Andrew Collier Cameron is a British astronomer specialising in the discovery and characterisation of exoplanets. He is a founding co-investigator of the WASP project and served as the head of the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of St Andrews between 2012 and 2015 where he is currently a professor.

#3521

Allen Boozer

#76008

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Allen Boozer is an American physicist, full professor, Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University and co-recipient of the 2010 Hannes Alfvén Prize. He is noted for work in plasma physics.

#3522

Dante Lauretta

#74652

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Dante S. Lauretta is a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. He is the principal investigator on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission.

#3523

Eugenio Coronado

#101591

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

#3524

Nicolas J. Cerf

#72029

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Nicolas Jean Cerf is a Belgian physicist. He is professor of quantum mechanics and information theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a member of the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium. He received his Ph.D. at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1993, and was a researcher at the Université de Paris 11 and the California Institute of Technology. He is the director of the Center for Quantum Information and Computation at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

#3525

Patrick Sung

#63133

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Patrick Sung is an American professor of structural biology and biochemistry at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He is known for his work on DNA repair. Biography Sung was born on May 24, 1959, in Hong Kong. In 1981, he got his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Liverpool and four years later got his Ph.D. from Oxford University. From 1993 to 1997 he was an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch and from that year till 2001 served as an associate professor of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio where he...

#3526

Vladimir Nakoryakov

#62757

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Vladimir Yeliferyevich Nakoryakov was a Soviet and Russian scientist in the fields of thermal physics and fluid dynamics. An academician of Russian Academy of Sciences, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1972, and was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1983.

#3527

Edgar Choueiri

#21823

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Edgar Y. Choueiri is a Lebanese American plasma physicist and previously president of the Lebanese Academy of Sciences. He is best known for clarifying the role of plasma instabilities in spacecraft electric thrusters , for conceiving and developing new spacecraft propulsion concepts and, more recently, for his work on 3D audio.

#3528

Wolfgang Domcke

#101675

Overall Influence

#3529

Johann Bauersachs

#94366

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Prof. Dr. Johann Bauersachs is a German internist, cardiologist, and full professor at the Hannover Medical School. He is widely recognized for his scholarly contributions to the domains of acute coronary syndrome, left ventricular repair and remodelling following ischemia, and acute and chronic heart failure.

#3530

Fabian Walter

#101708

Overall Influence

#3531

Mikhail Rabinovich

#39605

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Mikhail Izrailevich Rabinovich is a Russian influential physicist and neuroscientist working in the field of nonlinear dynamics and its applications. His work helped shape the understanding of dynamical systems.

#3532

Jacques Villain

#69648

Overall Influence

1934 - 2022 (88 years)

Jacques Villain was a French physicist. He received his PhD at the École normale supérieure, did research at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, held, from 1984 to 1988, the position of a director at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany, and he was, since 1996, directeur des recherches at the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique. In the year 2000 he was elected as a member of the Académie des sciences.

#3533

Alf Adams

#34300

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Alfred Rodney Adams is a British physicist who invented the strained-layer quantum-well laser. Most modern homes will have several of these devices in their homes in all types of electronic equipment.

#3534

Palash Baran Pal

Palash Baran Pal

#76878

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Palash Baran Pal is an Indian theoretical physicist, an Emeritus Professor in the Physics Department of Science College, Calcutta University, Kolkata, a writer, a linguist and a poet. His main area of research is Particle Physics. His works in the area of neutrino physics and relativistic treatment of particle properties in matter are well recognized in the particle physics community. Apart from his scientific contributions, he has authored well known text books in physics as well as several popular science literature in Bengali to popularize science.

#3535

Seweryn Chomet

#54399

Overall Influence

1930 - 2009 (79 years)

Seweryn Chomet, FInstP was a physicist, author, journalist, historian, publisher, prolific translator of Russian scientific journals into English, and former visiting research fellow of King's College London. He was a colleague and friend of such famous scientists as the physicists John Randall and Maurice Wilkins; he had just finished the book he had been writing for the last few years, Dr. Groer and The General's Hat, about the history of Poland and the discovery of E. coli, when he died at his home in Chelsea, London, where he lived for many years in later life, on 24 July 2009 after battling what his doctors said, shortly before he died, was motor neurons disease, for about a year.

#3536

Frank Matthews Leslie

Frank Matthews Leslie

#69779

Overall Influence

1935 - 2000 (65 years)

Professor Frank Matthews Leslie FRS FRSE was a Scottish mathematical physicist specializing in continuum mechanics. He is remembered for the Ericksen–Leslie Theory which he developed with Jerald Ericksen to describe the viscosity of mesophases associated with liquid crystals. The parameters of this theory are viscosities called "Leslie coefficients", and the angle at which a nematic orientates with respect to the direction of flow in a steady shear flow is called the "Leslie angle".

#3537

Alexei Zamolodchikov

Alexei Zamolodchikov

#49856

Overall Influence

1952 - 2007 (55 years)

Alexei Borisovich Zamolodchikov was a Russian physicist known for his contributions to quantum field theory, quantum gravity and the Liouville string theory. Today, the application of this technique is a standard way of analyzing 2D quantum field theories beyond perturbation theory.

#3538

Sidney R. Nagel

#89260

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Sidney Robert Nagel is an American physicist and the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where he is affiliated with the Department of Physics, the James Franck Institute, and the Enrico Fermi Institute. His research focuses on complex everyday physics such as "the anomalous flow of granular material, the long messy tendrils left by honey spooned from one dish to another, the pesky rings deposited by spilled coffee on a table after the liquid evaporates or the common splash of a drop of liquid onto a countertop." His work includes high-speed photography ...

#3539

Natan Andrei

#101933

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Natan Andrei is an American theoretical physicist who deals with solid state physics and particle physics. He is a distinguished professor at Rutgers University. Andrei received his doctorate in 1979 from Princeton University under supervision of David Gross. In 1989 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2004 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Independently of Paul Wiegmann, he succeeded in 1980 in finding the exact solution of the Kondo problem. In 2017, both were awarded the Lars Onsager Prize. With John H. Lowenstein, he solved the Chiral Gross–Neveu model usin...

#3540

Enrico Costa

#67067

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Enrico Costa is an Italian astrophysicist, known for studies of gamma ray bursts . Costa's family moved in 1954 to Rome, where he spent the remainder of his childhood and adolescence and studied physics. For his PhD with Giulio Auriemma, he participated in rocket experiments with X-ray detectors at the IAS in Rome. In 1976, he joined the IAS and worked on balloon experiments. Later he was involved in BeppoSAX, the Italian X-ray astronomy satellite , which operated from 1996 to 2003. Costa was in 1981 part of the team of Livio Scarsi, which proposed the construction of the satellite for X-ray detection.

#3541

Walter D. Knight

#89948

Overall Influence

1919 - 2000 (81 years)

Walter D. Knight was an American physicist. He discovered the Knight shift, the effect that has been given his name. Knight shifts are frequency shifts of the nuclear magnetic resonance in metals.

#3542

Pavel Winternitz

#85924

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Pavel Winternitz was a Canadian Czech-born mathematical physicist. He did his undergraduate studies at Prague University and his doctorate at Leningrad University under the supervision of J. A. Smorodinsky. His research is on integrable systems and symmetries.

#3543

Noemie Benczer Koller

#86732

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Noemie Benczer Koller is a nuclear physicist. She was the first tenured female professor of Rutgers College. Early life and education Koller was born Noemie Benczer in Vienna, Austria, on born August 21, 1933. Her father was a Ph.D. chemist and her mother worked as a bookbinder. The family moved frequently in her early childhood due to the turbulence of World War II. Her family moved from Vienna to Paris, and then subsequently moved further south in France several times to escape the German invasion. They subsequently emigrated to Cuba, and then to Mexico where she attended the Lycée Franco-Mexicain beginning in 1943.

#3544

Per Carlqvist

#80089

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Per Carlqvist is a Swedish plasma physicist with an interest in astrophysical applications. In 1963, he received the degree of civilingenjör from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in 1970 the Tekn. lic., and in 1980 the Tekn. D.

#3545

Robert D. Stephens

#37793

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Robert D. Stephens is an American amateur astronomer and a prolific photometrist of minor planets at the Center for Solar System Studies , Rancho Cucamonga in California, United States. Career By profession, Stephens is a Certified Public Accountant in California since 1978, and has co-founded the accounting firm Fox & Stephens Inc. in 1988.

#3546

Peter K. Sorger

#102142

Overall Influence

#3547

David Callaway

#55664

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

David James Edward Callaway is a biological nanophysicist in the New York University School of Medicine, where he is professor and laboratory director. He was trained as a theoretical physicist by Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, and Cosmas Zachos, and was previously an associate professor at the Rockefeller University after positions at CERN and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Callaway's laboratory discovered potential therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease based upon apomorphine after an earlier paper of his developed models of Alzheimer amyloid formation. He has also initiated the study of prote...

#3548

John J. Kavelaars

#53760

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

J-John Kavelaars, better known as JJ Kavelaars , is a Canadian astronomer who was part of a team that discovered several moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. He is also a discoverer of minor planets and an investigator on the extended New Horizons mission, having aided in the discovery of 486958 Arrokoth.

#3549

Alberto Diaspro

#68918

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Alberto Diaspro is an Italian scientist. He received his doctoral degree in electronic engineering from the university of Genoa, Italy, in 1983. He is full professor in applied physics at university of Genoa. He is research director of Nanoscopy Italian Institute of Technology. Alberto Diaspro is President of the Italian biophysical society SIBPA. In 2022 he got the Gregorio Weber Award for excellence in fluorescence.

#3550

Zdeněk Švestka

#86090

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Zdeněk Švestka was a Czech astronomer. For several decades he was the world's leading expert on solar flares. He studied mathematics and physics at Charles University, Prague, until graduating in 1948. Together with Cornelis de Jager, he was the co-founder and editor of the journal Solar Physics. For 38 years, from the establishment of the journal in 1967 until his retirement in 2005, he handled all papers on solar flares, while De Jager took care of everything else. The minor planet 17805 Švestka was named after him.

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