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,

#3751

Kazuro Watanabe

#73685

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Kazurō Watanabe is a Japanese amateur astronomer and prolific discoverer of minor planets. He was born in Hokkaidō, Japan and is a member of the Astronomical Society of Japan as well as of the Oriental Astronomical Association.

#3752

Makoto Gonokami

#44651

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

is a professor of science and engineering in University of Tokyo, mostly in the field of physics. He was 30th president of the University of Tokyo, after succeeding Junichi Hamada who retired in 2015, and until the expiration of his term in March 2021. In 2022 he became president of Riken.

#3753

Erwin Friedlander

Erwin Friedlander

#94741

Overall Influence

1925 - 2004 (79 years)

Erwin Max Friedlander was a noted American expert in high-energy nuclear physics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences. Biography A pioneer in the use of nuclear emulsions for cosmic ray and accelerator research, Friedlander founded and headed the Cosmic Rays Laboratory at the Institute for Atomic Physics in Bucharest, Romania, before emigrating to the United States in 1975.

#3754

Warren Elliot Henry

Warren Elliot Henry

#43641

Overall Influence

1909 - 2001 (92 years)

Warren Elliot Henry was an American physicist, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his work in the fields of magnetism and superconductivity. He made significant contributions to the advancement of science and technology and education, training and mentoring several generations of physicists.

#3755

Kurt Lücke

#105692

Overall Influence

#3756

Reiner Kruecken

#102811

Overall Influence

Reiner Kruecken is the Nuclear Science Division Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Before moving to LBNL in June 2022, he served as Deputy Director at TRIUMF, Canada's Particle Accelerator Centre. He joined TRIUMF in February 2011 after years at the Technical University Munich, Germany, where he held the chair for Experimental Physics of Hadrons and Nuclei. From 2011 to 2015 Kruecken was the head of the Science Division at TRIUMF and he held a joint appointment as full professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

#3757

Durward William John Cruickshank

#49713

Overall Influence

1927 - 2007 (80 years)

Durward William John Cruickshank , often known as D. W. J. Cruickshank, was a British crystallographer whose work transformed the precision of determining molecular structures from X-ray crystal structure analysis. He developed the theoretical framework for anisotropic displacement parameters, also known as the thermal ellipsoid, for crystal structure determination in a series of papers published in 1956 in Acta Crystallographica.

#3758

Nicolas Wöhrl

#70563

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Nicolas Wöhrl is a German physicist, science communicator and podcaster. Biography Nicolas Wöhrl was born in Recklinghausen, Germany the son of Thomas Wöhrl, a geophysicist and Magdalene Wöhrl, a magistrate.

#3759

Dietrich Menzel

#105744

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

#3760

Ted Bastin

#54080

Overall Influence

1926 - 2011 (85 years)

Edward William "Ted" Bastin was a physicist and mathematician who held doctorate degrees in mathematics from Queen Mary College, London University and physics from King's College, Cambridge, to which he won an Isaac Newton studentship. For a time, he was visiting fellow at Stanford University, California and a research fellow, King's College, Cambridge, England.

#3761

Atish Dabholkar

Atish Dabholkar

#68142

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Atish Dabholkar is an Indian theoretical physicist. He is currently the Director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics with the rank of Assistant Director-General, UNESCO. Prior to that, he was head of ICTP's High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics section, and also Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at Sorbonne University in the "Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies" .

#3762

Dora Altbir

#70113

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Dora Altbir is a Chilean physicist in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. She was awarded the National Prize for Exact Sciences in 2019 for her work in the theoretical study of magnetic nanostructures. She is currently a professor at the University of Santiago, Chile.

#3763

Yuri Alekseevich Ryzhov

Yuri Alekseevich Ryzhov

#69277

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Yuri Alekseevich Ryzhov was a Soviet and Russian scientist in the field of fluid dynamics, political and social activist, diplomat, Doctor of Technical Sciences , member of the Russian Academy of Sciences , former Russian Ambassador to France .

#3764

Chii-Dong Lin

#105800

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Chii-Dong Lin is a Taiwanese physicist. Lin was born in 1946, and is a native of Changhua County. After graduating from National Taiwan University in 1969, he earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1974 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University until 1976, when he joined the Kansas State University faculty. In 1985, Lin was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, "[f]or his pioneering hyperspherical coordinate analyses of two electron atoms and ions, and his contribution to the development of the relativistic random phase approximation for atomic photoionization.

#3765

Varun Sahni

#41513

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Varun Bhisham Sahni is an Indian theoretical physicist, astrophysicist and a Distinguished Professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Known for his research on cosmology, Sahni is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and National Academy of Sciences, India. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest India...

#3766

John M. Edmond

#44504

Overall Influence

1943 - 2001 (58 years)

John Marmion Edmond FRS was a professor of marine geochemistry and oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who did pioneering work on oceanic particulate matter, the oceanic carbon dioxide cycle, trace elements, and radioisotopes. He explored and analyzed water chemistry from environments as diverse as the mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal vents to the polar oceans to remote rivers and lakes in South America, Africa, Siberia, and Tibet. He and his students and colleagues in his lab measured more chemical elements at lower concentrations in water than had ever been done before.

#3767

Bruce Rosen

#54301

Overall Influence

Bruce Rosen is an American physicist and radiologist and a leading expert in the area of functional neuroimaging. His research for the past 30 years has focused on the development and application of physiological and functional nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, as well as new approaches to combine functional magnetic resonance imaging data with information from other modalities such as positron emission tomography , magnetoencephalography and noninvasive optical imaging. The techniques his group has developed to measure physiological and metabolic changes associated with brain activatio...

#3768

Carolyne Van Vliet

#23906

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Carolyne Marina Van Vliet was a Dutch-American physicist notable for the theory of generation-recombination noise and for the theory of quantum transport in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, as well as for her many contributions to the foundations of Linear Response Theory. She was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers .

#3769

Aryabhata II

#50590

Overall Influence

Āryabhaṭa also known as Arya Diya Jankhi was an Indian mathematician and astronomer, and the author of the Maha-Siddhanta. The numeral II is given to him to distinguish him from the earlier and more influential Āryabhaṭa I. Scholars are unsure of when exactly he was born, though David Pingree dates of his main publications between 950–1100. The manuscripts of his Maha-Siddhanta have been discovered from Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Bengal, so he probably lived in northern India.

#3770

Richard Battye

#93768

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Richard Battye is a cosmologist, theoretical physicist and former first-class cricketer. He is currently a Professor of Cosmology at the University of Manchester and has been the associate director in the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics since 2015.

#3771

Gennadiy Borisov

Gennadiy Borisov

#76565

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Gennadiy Vladimirovich Borisov is a Ukrainian telescope maker and amateur astronomer who discovered the first-known interstellar comet, 2I/Borisov, in 2019. Work Borisov works as an engineer at the of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute of Moscow State University. There, he maintains the telescopes, but does not make observations himself. He also works with Astronomicheskiy Nauchnyy Tsentr JSC, creating experimental telescopes in collaboration with Roscosmos.

#3772

Ferdinand Freudenstein

#17698

Overall Influence

1926 - 2006 (80 years)

Ferdinand Freudenstein was an American physicist and engineer known as the "Father of Modern Kinematics." Freudenstein applied digital computation to the kinematic synthesis of mechanismss. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he developed what became known as the Freudenstein equation, which uses a simple algebraic method to synthesize planar four-bar function generators.

#3773

Chen Ziyuan

#78213

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (102 years)

Chen Ziyuan is a Chinese agricultural scientist and nuclear physicist. He is the main founding father of China's nuclear agriculture. Biography Chen, a native of Yin County of Zhejiang, studied at Daxia University in Shanghai. After graduation, he taught at Daxia, which became part of East China Normal University in 1952.

#3774

Douglas C. Rees

#73114

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Douglas Charles "Doug" Rees is an American biochemist, biophysicist, and structural biologist. Rees graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in 1974 and received a PhD in biophysics from Harvard University in 1980. In 1982 he went to the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1989, he became a professor of chemistry at Caltech. There he is Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Professor and Dean of graduate studies. From 1997 onwards, he has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He served as the editor or co-editor of the Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecul...

#3775

Chiaki Mukai

#4577

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

is a Japanese physician and JAXA astronaut. She was the first Japanese woman in space, the first Japanese citizen to have two spaceflights, and the first Asian woman in space. Both were Space Shuttle missions; her first was STS-65 aboard Space Shuttle Columbia in July 1994, which was a Spacelab mission. Her second spaceflight was STS-95 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998. In total she has spent 23 days in space.

#3776

Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille

#79668

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, , is a French cosmologist. During her career as a researcher in particle physics, she has taken part in several large-scale experiments. Her work has been recognized several times including the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize, the appointment as Knight of the Legion of Honor and her election to the French Academy of Sciences.

#3777

Scott Dodelson

#56893

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Scott Dodelson is an American physicist. He is a professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University and chair of its physics department. Biography Dodelson received his B.A., B.S., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His thesis supervisor was Gerald Feinberg. He was a research fellow at Harvard University before moving to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1998 and was professor until 2017, when he joined Carnegie Mellon University. His research has focused on the intersection of physics and cosmology and has out studies on dark matter, dark energy, and cosmological neutrinos.

#3778

Kishan Dholakia

#105993

Overall Influence

#3779

Eric Poisson

#79505

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Eric Poisson is a Canadian award-winning physicist specializing in the study of black holes. Poisson is a professor at the University of Guelph as well as an affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

#3780

Rod Crewther

#82184

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Rodney James Crewther was a physicist, notable in the field of gauge field theories. Education After gaining his MSc at Melbourne University, Crewther was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the California Institute of Technology. He studied under the tutelage of Nobel prizewinner Murray Gell-Mann and completed his doctorate, in 1971, after successfully defending his dissertation against the renowned theorist Richard Feynman. His thesis was entitled Spontaneous Breakdown of Conformal and Chiral Invariance.

#3781

Lorenzo A. Richards

#20411

Overall Influence

1904 - 1993 (89 years)

Lorenzo Adolph Richards or known as Ren was one of the 20th century's most influential minds in the field of soil physics. Biography Early life Lorenzo A. Richards was born on April 24, 1904, in the town of Fielding, Utah, and received a B.S. and M.A. degree in physics from Utah State University. He was the grandson of early Mormon leader and pioneer Willard Richards. His PhD thesis, completed at Cornell University in 1931 and entitled Capillary conduction of liquids through porous mediums, was arguably one of the best known in the field of soil physics.

#3782

John Edwin Field

#90683

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

John Edwin Field FRS was a British experimental physicist whose research focused on the physics and chemistry of solids, particularly involving energetic phenomena and materials, covering a variety of topics from erosion to explosives.

#3783

Lesley Cohen

#71342

Overall Influence

Lesley Francis Cohen is a Professor of solid-state physics at Imperial College London. She works in magnetic materials for solid-state magnetic refrigeration and spintronic applications. Cohen has served as the editor-in-chief of Applied Physics Letters since 2019.

#3784

Albert G. Hill

#40856

Overall Influence

1910 - 1996 (86 years)

Albert Gordon Hill was a physicist. He was a key leader in the development of radar in World War II, director of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory development of the electronic Distant Early Warning and SAGE continental air defense systems, and first chairman of The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. He died in 1996.

#3785

Richard Victor Jones

#55156

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Richard Victor Jones was a professor of applied physics at Harvard University and a pioneer in semiconductors. He was one of the first four recruits by William Shockley to help develop technologies at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.

#3786

Peter T. Gallagher

#82837

Overall Influence

Peter Thomas Gallagher is an Irish astrophysicist. He specialises in solar physics, notably solar storms and their impact on the Earth. He is Senior Professor, and Head of Astronomy and Astrophysics, at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, director of Dunsink Observatory, and an adjunct professor at Trinity College Dublin. He is also the head of the radio-telescope project I-LOFAR, at Birr Castle. He is widely cited in his field and often quoted in the media.

#3787

Won‐tien Tsang

#106261

Overall Influence

#3788

James G. Berryman

#106267

Overall Influence

#3789

George Benedek

#106294

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

George Bernard Benedek is an American physicist currently the Alfred H. Caspary Professor of Physics and Biological Physics and of Health Sciences and Technology Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#3790

Susumu Noda

#106304

Overall Influence

#3791

Arlo U. Landolt

#79322

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

Arlo Udell Landolt was an American astronomer known for his widely used photometric standards. Life and career Early life Landolt was born in Highland, Illinois to farmers Arlo M. Landolt and Vesta Kraus Landolt on September 29, 1935. He was the oldest of 4 Darnell M., Faye Beth, Sheryl Sue. He attended a one-room country grade school called IXL Country Grade School. He graduated grade school in 7 of 8 years because they accelerated his education. All of Landolt's relatives, like his parents, were farmers. After finishing grade school, he was the first of his family to go the high school. While in high school he took all the classes for agriculture.

#3792

H. Rodney Withers

#85494

Overall Influence

1932 - 2015 (83 years)

H. Rodney Withers was an Australian radiation biologist and physician. He made many contributions to the fields of radiobiology and clinical radiation therapy, but he is best known for his work on post-radiation tissue repair and the effects of ionizing radiation on normal tissues.

#3793

Ed Nather

#30575

Overall Influence

1926 - 2014 (88 years)

Roy Edward Nather was an American astronomer, who at the time of his death, was professor emeritus in Astronomy at University of Texas at Austin. He pioneered the fields of asteroseismology of white dwarfs, and observational studies of interacting binary collapsed starss.

#3794

Mark Welland

#40638

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Sir Mark Edward Welland, is a British physicist who is a professor of nanotechnology at the University of Cambridge and head of the Nanoscience Centre. He has been a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, since 1986 and started his career in nanotechnology at IBM Research, where he was part of the team that developed one of the first scanning tunnelling microscopes. He was served as the Master of St Catharine's College, Cambridge and took up office from 2016 to 2023.

#3795

Roman Juszkiewicz

Roman Juszkiewicz

#94691

Overall Influence

1952 - 2012 (60 years)

Roman Juszkiewicz was a Polish astrophysicist whose work concerned fundamental issues of cosmology. Juszkiewicz was born in Warsaw. He studied at Moscow State University , where he graduated in 1976. In 1981 he obtained a PhD at the University of Warsaw. During 1984–1986 he visited Cambridge and Sussex universities, he spent 1986–87 at Berkeley, 1987–1991 at Princeton, and from 1989 was a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He also worked at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris and the University of Geneva. Juszkiewicz held a professor position at N. Copernicus Astronomical...

#3796

Charles K. Bockelman

#96299

Overall Influence

1922 - 2002 (80 years)

Charles Kincaid Bockelman was an American nuclear physicist and deputy provost of Yale University. He was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. Career Charles Bockelman's career started in the Washington, D.C., office of Senator Harry S. Truman while he studied physics and chemistry at George Washington University. During World War II he served in the United States Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater of Operations. After the war he earned his Ph.B. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin. As a graduate student, Bockelman concentrated on nuclear physics and went on to do...

#3797

William Eaton

#74201

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

William Allen Eaton is a biophysical chemist who is a NIH Distinguished Investigator, Chief of the Section on Biophysical Chemistry, and Chief of the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, one of the 20 Institutes of the United States National Institutes of Health.

#3798

Eckehard Schöll

#84297

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Eckehard Schöll is a German physicist and mathematician as well as a Professor of theoretical physics at the Technical University of Berlin. He is an expert in the field of nonlinear dynamics and head of the group Nonlinear dynamics and control. His work pertains to research in the fields of mathematics and physics, particularly semiconductor physics, neurodynamics and bifurcation theory. His latest research is also related to topics in biology and the social sciences, e.g. simulation of the dynamics in socioeconomic or neuronal networks. He is one of the forerunners into the research of ...

#3799

Timothy L. Killeen

#94484

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Timothy Laurence Killeen is a British and American geophysicist, space scientist, professor, and university administrator. Killeen took office as the president of the University of Illinois system in 2015. He has been the principal investigator on research projects for NASA and the National Science Foundation. Killeen has authored more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals as well as more than 300 other publications and papers. He has served on various White House committees and task forces and is a past editor-in-chief of the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics.

#3800

Avril V. Somlyo

#106497

Overall Influence

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