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,

#3651

Martin Walt

#60085

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Martin Walt was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He specialized in magnetospheric physics. He was also the father of Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

#3652

Michael Nauenberg

Michael Nauenberg

#101268

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Michael Nauenberg was an American theoretical physicist and physics historian. Life Born to a secular Jewish family in Berlin, his family emigrated to Barranquilla, Colombia in 1939 to escape persecution from the Nazis in World War II. When he moved to the United States in the 1950s, Nauenberg studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his doctorate in 1960 from Cornell University under Hans Bethe with a thesis on particle physics. He then became a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1961 to 1965, he was Assistant Professor of Physics at Columbia University.

#3653

Kenneth W. West

#104144

Overall Influence

#3654

Richard S. Muller

Richard S. Muller

#50767

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Richard Stephen Muller is an American professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He made contributions to the founding and growth of the field of MicroElectromechanical Systems . Together with student, Roger T. Howe, he made the initial seminal contribution of polysilicon sacrificially-released beams in 1982. This led to a class of micromanufacturing processes called surface micromachining. These processes preceded the creation of low cost, mass-produced commercial micro accelerometers, which are used in automotive collision sensors for airbag deployment.

#3655

Dick Bond

#99146

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

John Richard Bond , also known as J. Richard Bond, is a Canadian astrophysicist and cosmologist. Bond received his bachelor's degree in 1973 from the University of Toronto and his PhD in theoretical physics in 1979 from Caltech under the supervision of William A. Fowler. Beginning in 1985 he has been a professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and at the University of Toronto. He served 2 five-year terms as CITA's director, and since 2002 he has been the director of the Cosmology and Gravity Program for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research .

#3656

Marcia Barbosa

#44423

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Márcia Cristina Bernardes Barbosa is a Brazilian physicist known for her research on the properties of water, and for her efforts for improving the conditions for women in academia. She is a professor at UFRGS, and a director of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

#3657

Jen Gupta

#48074

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Jennifer Ann Gupta, known as Jen, is an astrophysicist and science communicator based at the University of Portsmouth. She has presented on Tomorrow's World on the BBC. Education Gupta grew up in Winchester and completed her A-Levels at Peters Symonds Sixth Form College. She completed her master's degree at the University of Manchester, before beginning a PhD at the university's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. She earned her PhD "Multiwavelength Studies of Radio-loud Active Galactic Nuclei in the Fermi Era" in 2012.

#3658

Scott Jay Kenyon

#90370

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Scott Jay Kenyon is an American astrophysicist. His work has included advances in symbiotic and other types of interacting binary stars, the formation and evolution of stars, and the formation of planetary systems.

#3659

Vedika Khemani

#74957

Overall Influence

Vedika Khemani is an Indian-American physicist and Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Her research considers many-body systems and condensed matter physics. She was awarded the 2021 American Physical Society George E. Valley Jr. Prize.

#3660

Nikolay Devyatkov

#28154

Overall Influence

1907 - 2001 (94 years)

Nikolay Dmitrievich Devyatkov was a Soviet and Russian scientist and inventor of microwave vacuum tubes and medical equipment. Full Member of the USSR/Russian Academy of Sciences . Professor of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

#3661

Franck Laloë

#76393

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Franck Laloë is a French quantum physicist, author, and open archive initiator. He is emeritus research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research . Education and career Laloë was born in Rabat, Morocco and studied physics at the École Polytechnique in Paris from 1960 to 1962. His studied at University of Paris VI for a two-part doctorate. His PhD from 1963 to 1968 involved research on spin-polarized helium-3 systems. He obtained Doctorat d'État in 1970. He worked for the CNRS and became director from 1978. Later Laloë worked at the Kastler–Brossel Laboratory in Paris, w...

#3662

Tarmo Oja

#99763

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Tarmo Oja is a professor in astronomy at Uppsala University who studies galactic structure and variable stars. He was the director at the Swedish Kvistaberg Station of the Uppsala Observatory from 1970 until his retirement in 1999.

#3663

Roman Maev

#59166

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Roman Grigorievich Maev , is a Canadian professor of physics at the University of Windsor , distinguished university professor, the Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences , full professor in physics , Dr. Sc. , Ph. D. . Dr. Maev is the founding director of the Institute for Diagnostic Imaging Research at the University of Windsor.

#3664

A. Brooks Harris

#95502

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Arthur Brooks Harris, called Brooks Harris, is an American physicist. Biography Harris was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Harvard University with bachelor's degree in 1956, master's degree in 1959, and PhD in experimental solid state physics from Horst Meyer in 1962. Harris was in 1961/62 at Duke University to complete his doctoral thesis with Meyer and then was an instructor there from 1962 to 1964. During 1961–1964 at Duke University Harris retrained himself as a theorist in condensed matter physics and then spent the academic year 1964/65 as a researcher working with John Hubbard in the UK at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment near Harwell, Oxfordshire.

#3665

Bill Price

#40572

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

Professor William Charles Price FRS was a British physicist . Brought up in Swansea, he spent his career at the universities of Cambridge and London. His work was important for identifying the hydrogen bond structure of DNA base pairs.

#3666

Suzanne Aigrain

Suzanne Aigrain

#83601

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Suzanne Aigrain is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She studies exoplanets and stellar variability. Early life and education Aigrain grew up in Toulouse, France, and was educated at the Lycée Pierre-de-Fermat. She studied physics at Imperial College London and graduated in 2000. During her undergraduate studies she was an intern at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She spent sixth months at the European Space Agency before joining the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge for her doctoral studies, earning a PhD in 2005 for work o...

#3667

Eduard Prugovečki

#52782

Overall Influence

1937 - 2003 (66 years)

Eduard Prugovečki was a Canadian physicist and mathematician of Croatian-Romanian descent. Prugovečki was born in Craiova, Romania to a Romanian mother, Helena , and Croatian father, Slavoljub. He completed the first four years of secondary education in Bucharest, before his family was forced to relocate to Zagreb in 1951, due to an anti-Yugoslav campaign by the communist authorities. He finished high school there and proceeded to study physics at the University of Zagreb, getting his diploma in 1959. He joined the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Institute Ruđer Bošković in Zagreb, w...

#3668

Ordal Demokan

#26847

Overall Influence

1946 - 2004 (58 years)

Ordal Demokan was a Turkish physicist. Biography Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Demokan graduated from TED Ankara Koleji in 1962, and received his BSc and MSc degrees on Electrical Engineering in 1966 and 1967 from Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He received TUBITAK scholarship between 1964 and 1967. He received his PhD degree on physics from University of Iowa in 1970, through Fulbright scholarship between 1967 and 1969 and University of Iowa Education Scholarship.

#3669

Mujaddid Ahmed Ijaz

Mujaddid Ahmed Ijaz

#48711

Overall Influence

1937 - 1992 (55 years)

Mujaddid Ahmed Ijaz, Ph.D. , was a Pakistani-American experimental physicist noted for his role in discovering new isotopes that expanded the neutron-deficient side of the atomic chart. Some of the isotopes he discovered enabled significant advances in medical research, particularly in the treatment of cancer, and further advanced the experimental understanding of nuclear structures. Ijaz conducted his research work at Oak Ridge National Laboratories . He and his ORNL colleagues published more than 60 papers in physics journals announcing isotope discoveries and other results of their accelera...

#3670

Patrick Hayden

#39243

Overall Influence

Patrick Hayden is a physicist and computer scientist active in the fields of quantum information theory and quantum computing. He is currently a professor in the Stanford University physics department and a distinguished research chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Prior to that he held a Canada Research Chair in the physics of information at McGill University. He received a B.Sc. from McGill University and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study for a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Artur Ekert. In 2007 he was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science.

#3671

Michał Horodecki

#53113

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Michał Horodecki is a Polish physicist at the University of Gdańsk working in the field of quantum information theory, notable for his work on entanglement theory. He co-discovered the Peres-Horodecki criterion for testing whether a state is entangled, and used it to find bound entanglement together with his brother Paweł Horodecki and father Ryszard Horodecki. He co-discovered with Jonathan Oppenheim, Paweł Horodecki and Karol Horodecki that secret key can be drawn from some bound entangled states. Together with Fernando Brandao he proved that every one-dimensional quantum state with a finite correlation length obeys an area law for entanglement entropy.

#3672

Annette Ferguson

#91189

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Annette Mairi Nelson Ferguson FRSE is a Scottish observational astrophysicist who specialises in the area of galaxy evolution. She is a professor at the Institute for Astronomy, Edinburgh, and holds the Personal Chair in Observational Astrophysics at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh.

#3673

Henry E. Holt

#71252

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Henry E. Holt was an American astronomer and prolific discoverer of minor planets and comets, who has worked as a planetary geologist at the United States Geological Survey and Northern Arizona University.

#3674

Emma Chapman

#31193

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (38 years)

Emma Olivia Chapman is a British physicist and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow at Imperial College London. Her research investigates the epoch of reionization. She won the 2018 Royal Society Athena Prize. In November 2020 Chapman published her first book, First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time.

#3675

David Peak

#68760

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

David Peak is Professor of Physics at Utah State University. His current research focuses on the interdisciplinary field of complexity and computation in biological phenomena, motivated by the similarities between stomata and cellular automata. Peak was one founder of the National Council on Undergraduate Research and is on the governing board of the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research.

#3676

Dominique Langevin

#77520

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Dominique Langevin is a French researcher in physical chemistry. She is research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and leads the liquid interface group in the Laboratory of Solid State Physics at the University of Paris-Sud. She was the Life and Physical Sciences Panel chair for the European Space Sciences Committee of the European Science Foundation from 2013-2021.

#3677

Raphaël Granier de Cassagnac

#93304

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Raphaël Granier de Cassagnac is a French physicist and writer. He is specialized in nuclear and particle physics. He is a member of the PHENIX experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory and of the CMS experiment at CERN where he is involved in studying the Quark-Gluon Plasma in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.

#3678

Ani Aprahamian

#75427

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Ani Aprahamian is a Lebanese-born Armenian-American nuclear physicist. She has taught at the University of Notre Dame since 1989. She is currently Freimann Professor of Physics at Notre Dame. She has been director of the Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory in Armenia since April 2018, the first woman to hold the position.

#3679

Swapan K. Gayen

#26330

Overall Influence

Swapan Kumar Gayen is a Bengali-American physicist. He is a professor of physics at the City University of New York. Education and career Gayen was born in a Bengali family in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his BSc and MSc in physics from the University of Dhaka in 1977. In 1984, he received his PhD in physics from the University of Connecticut. His thesis was titled Two-photon absorption spectroscopy of the trivalent cerium ion in calcium fluoride.

#3680

Sergei Voloshin

#84149

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Sergei Voloshin is a Russian-American experimental high-energy nuclear physicist and Professor of Physics at Wayne State University. He is best known for his work on event-by-event physics in heavy ion collisions.

#3681

Ronald J. Stouffer

#104570

Overall Influence

Ronald J. Stouffer is a meteorologist and adjunct professor at the University of Arizona, formerly Senior Research Climatologist and head of the Climate and Ecosystems Group at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory , part of NOAA. He has also served on the faculty of Princeton University.

#3682

Ahmed Nabuh Zaki Rashed

#104636

Overall Influence

#3683

Willie Hobbs Moore

#43361

Overall Influence

1934 - 1994 (60 years)

Willie Hobbs Moore was an American physicist and engineer. She was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in physics. Education Willie Hobbs was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on May 23, 1934, to parents Bessie and William Hobbs.

#3684

Steven Kahn

#93229

Overall Influence

Steven Michael Kahn is an American physicist currently the Cassius Lamb Kirk Professor at Stanford University and formerly the I. I. Rabi Professor of Physics at Columbia University and is an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Physical Society.

#3685

Kyriakos Tamvakis

#102947

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Kyriakos Tamvakis is a Greek theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Ioannina. Kyriakos Tamvakis studied at the University of Athens and gained his Ph.D. at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA in 1978. His thesis title was "Induced Boson Selfcouplings In Four Fermion And Yukawa Theories". Since then he has held several positions at CERN’s Theory Division in Geneva, Switzerland. He has been Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Ioannina, Greece, since 1982. Professor Tamvakis has published more than 100 articles on theoretical high-energy physics in...

#3686

John C. Wyngaard

#104672

Overall Influence

#3687

Mark Henkelman

#98476

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

R. Mark Henkelman is a Canadian biophysics researcher in the field of medical imaging, now retired, who was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Order of Canada in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the field of magnetic resonance imaging.

#3688

Kaare Aksnes

#81467

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Kaare Aksnes is a professor at the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo. Personal life He was born in Kvam, Hordaland as a brother of the chemist Gunnar Aksnes. His parents were farmers. In 1959 he married teacher Liv Kristin Marøy.

#3689

Amit Goyal

#23966

Overall Influence

Amit Goyal is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and a SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at SUNY-Buffalo. He leads the Laboratory for Heteroepitaxial Growth of Functional Materials & Devices. He is also Director of the New York State Center of Excellence in Plastics Recycling Research & Innovation, an externally funded center with initial funding of $4.5M for three years at SUNY-Buffalo. He is the founding director of the multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary RENEW Institute at SUNY-Buffalo in Buffalo, New York and served as director from 2015-2021. RENEW is an internally funded research institute at SUNY-Buffalo.

#3690

Boris Kayser

#71218

Overall Influence

Boris Jules Kayser is an American theoretical physicist. He specializes in the study of neutrinos. He worked at the National Science Foundation for nearly thirty years before joining the US government research facility Fermilab. He retired from Fermilab in 2012. For five years, he was the editor of the peer-reviewed journal the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science.

#3691

Marie Farge

#44209

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Marie Farge is a French mathematician and physicist who works as a director of research at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research. She is known for her research on wavelets and turbulence in fluid mechanics.

#3692

Статья Редакционная

#104743

Overall Influence

#3693

Sam Aronson

#80035

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Sam Aronson is an American physicist, formerly president of the American Physical Society in 2015 and also formerly the director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory from 2006 to 2012. Biography Aronson was born in Huntington, New York. He earned an A.B. in physics from Columbia University in 1964, and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1968.

#3694

Robert Swendsen

#79252

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Robert Haakon Swendsen is Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known in the computational physics community for the Swendsen-Wang algorithm, the Monte Carlo Renormalization Group and related methods that enable efficient computational studies of equilibrium phenomena near phase transitions. He is the 2014 Recipient of the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society.

#3695

Elsa M. Garmire

#83289

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Elsa M. Garmire, Elsa Meints Garmire, was born in Buffalo, New York, on November 9, 1939. She is the Sydney E. Junkins Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College, where she has served as Dean of Thayer School of Engineering. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineers, and the National Academy of Inventors, she helped pioneer laser technology and is an expert in nonlinear optics. She has patented devices to enhance optical communications including lasers, waveguides, and detectors.

#3696

Robert M. Walker

#67041

Overall Influence

1929 - 2004 (75 years)

Robert M. Walker was an American physicist, a planetary scientist, the founder and director of McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, noted for his co-discovery of the etchability of nuclear particle tracks in solids, as well as his conjecture that meteorites and lunar rocks contain a record of the ancient radiation history of various stars including the Sun. Asteroid 6372 was named Walker in his honor by the International Astronomical Union. Walker was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Walker was also a fellow of the American Physical Soci...

#3697

Walter Stibbs

#97321

Overall Influence

1919 - 2010 (91 years)

Douglas Walter Noble Stibbs FRSE FRAS was a 20th century Australian astronomer and astrophysicist, remembered for his work at St Andrews University where he held the Napier Chair in Astronomy for 30 years. The Prof Walter Stibbs Lectures at Sydney University are named in his honour.

#3698

Alan Boss

#44332

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Alan P. Boss is a United States astrophysicist and planetary scientist. Life and career Educated at the University of South Florida and the University of California, Santa Barbara, Boss is a prominent scientist in stellar and planetary system formation and the study of extrasolar planets who has made highly cited contributions to the study of gas giant planet and binary star system formation. He has published hundreds of articles in these areas and related fields. He is currently a Staff Member at the Carnegie Institution for Science in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. He was married...

#3699

Lorenzo Albacete

#40076

Overall Influence

1941 - 2014 (73 years)

Lorenzo Albacete Cintrón was a Puerto Rican theologian, Roman Catholic priest, scientist and author. A New York Times Magazine contributor, Albacete was one of the leaders in the United States for the international Catholic movement Communion and Liberation. He was the Chairman of the Board of Advisors of Crossroads Cultural Center.

#3700

Alexander Mcpherson

#104823

Overall Influence

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