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,

#4101

Myron L. Wolbarsht

#111726

Overall Influence

#4102

Harold Garner

#24758

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Harold Ray Garner , known informally as "Skip", is a biophysicist with research careers in plasma physics, bioengineering and bioinformatics. Garner was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his B.S. degree in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Missouri, Rolla in 1976 and a PhD in plasma/high temperature matter physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1982. He also holds an honorary professional engineering degree also from the University of Missouri, Rolla.

#4103

William Samson

#49921

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

William Byars Samson is a Scottish astronomer, academic, computer scientist and a researcher in the fields of Astronomy, Databases, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life. Will Samson graduated with a degree in mathematics from University of St. Andrews in 1966. He earned his PhD in Astronomy in 1971 from the University of Edinburgh. In 1976, Samson went on to study at Heriot-Watt University where he obtained his MSc in Computer Science."

#4104

Roger H. Newman

#111765

Overall Influence

#4105

Fred Watson

#64478

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Frederick Garnett Watson AM is an English-born astronomer and popular scientist in Australia. He holds the role of Australia's First Astronomer at Large within the Commonwealth Government of Australia, relaying the important aspects of Australian astronomy to the government, the general public, and associated organisations.

#4106

Dov Levine

#47417

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Dov I. Levine is an American-Israeli physicist, known for his research on quasicrystals, soft condensed matter physics , and statistical mechanics out of equilibrium. Education and career The son of a professor of physical chemistry, Dov Levine grew up in New York. He graduated in 1979 with a B.S. from Stony Brook University and in 1986 with a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. thesis Quasicrystals: A New Class of Ordered Structure was supervised by Paul Steinhardt.

#4107

William E. Brunk

#106631

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

William E. Brunk is an American retired astronomer and NASA administrator. Life and career William E. Brunk was born in Cleveland, Ohio on November 24, 1928. He was educated at high school in Cleveland, Ohio and attended the local Case Institute of Technology in 1948, gaining a B.S. in 1952 and an M.S. in Astronomy in 1954.

#4108

Pierre Villars

#111856

Overall Influence

#4109

Reed Brendon Wickner

#111863

Overall Influence

#4110

William Colglazier

William Colglazier

#60411

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

E. [Elmer] William Colglazier is an American physicist, best known as the fourth science and technology adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State. He assumed that position in July, 2011. In that role, he has written about the benefits of science diplomacy.

#4111

Jeroen van den Brink

#100182

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Jeroen van den Brink is a theoretical condensed matter physicist, director at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research, IFW Dresden and professor at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany. Van den Brink is known for contributions to the field of strongly correlated materials, in particular for proposals on magnetic and orbital ordering, mechanisms for multiferroicity and the theory of Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering .

#4112

Krzysztof Stanek

#107613

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Krzysztof Stanek is a Polish observational astrophysicist and Professor and University Distinguished Scholar at Ohio State University. He was named a University Distinguished Scholar in 2018. His research focus is on the explosive deaths of massive stars.

#4113

Luigi Lugiato

#81849

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Luigi Lugiato is an Italian physicist and professor emeritus at University of Insubria . He is best known for his work in theoretical nonlinear and quantum optics, and especially for the Lugiato–Lefever equation . He has authored more than 340 scientific articles, and the textbook Nonlinear Dynamical Systems . His work has been theoretical but has stimulated a large number of important experiments in the world. It is also characterized by the fact of combining the classical and quantum aspects of optical systems.

#4114

Charles Enz

#104974

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (101 years)

Charles Paul Enz is a Swiss theoretical physicist, known for his long association with Wolfgang Pauli. Biography Enz studied at ETH Zurich, where he earned his Diplom in 1952 under Wolfgang Pauli. Subsequently he was scientific assistant to at ETH in the field of solid state physics, and earned his doctorate there under Pauli in 1956. During the summer semester of 1956 and the winter semester of 1958/59, he was Pauli's assistant and presented his lectures. From 1959 to 1961 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Beginning in 1961, he was full professor at the Un...

#4115

Roberto Merlin

#70258

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Roberto D. Merlin is an Argentine physicist and Peter A. Franken Collegiate Professor of Physics and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He is known, among other things, for his work on quasiperiodic superlattices, squeezed phonons, and, most recently, for the discovery of "superfocusing", a method for creating lenses that can surpass the diffraction limit without using negative refraction materials.

#4116

Alexander Gaeta

#92509

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Alexander Luis Gaeta is an American physicist and the David M. Rickey Professor of Applied Physics at Columbia University. He is known for his work on quantum and nonlinear photonics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Optica , and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

#4117

Yoshihiro Ishibashi

#112010

Overall Influence

#4118

John Ruhl

#58049

Overall Influence

John Ruhl is Connecticut Professor in Physics and Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University. Education Ruhl received a BS in physics from the University of Michigan in 1987 and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1993. While a graduate student at Princeton, Ruhl, along with several other graduate students, co-authored the text Princeton Problems in Physics. His doctoral dissertation, A search for anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, was supervised by Mark Dragovan.

#4119

Korado Korlević

Korado Korlević

#79472

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Korado Korlević is a Croatian teacher and prolific amateur astronomer, who ranks among the world's top 20 discoverers of minor planets. As of 2016, he is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of 1162 numbered minor planets he made at Višnjan Observatory during 1996–2001. In addition, he is credited with the co-discovery of another 132 minor planets. His discoveries include the slowly-rotating outer main-belt asteroid 10415 Mali Lošinj, and 10645 Brač, a member of the Eunomia family of asteroids. He has also discovered two comets, namely 183P/Korlević-Jurić and 203P/Korlević.

#4120

Christopher Langton

Christopher Langton

#12612

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Christopher Gale Langton is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s when he organized the first "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute , to continue his research on artificial life. He left SFI in the late 1990s, and abandoned his work on artificial life, publishing no research since that time.

#4121

George C. Hadjipanayis

#112128

Overall Influence

#4122

Godfrey Gumbs

#49562

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Godfrey Gumbs is a professor of theoretical solid state physics. He is a distinguished professor of physics at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the Maria A. Chianta and Alice M. Stoll Professor of Physics at Hunter College, CUNY.

#4123

Bo Sundqvist

#75219

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Bo Sundqvist is a Swedish physicist and former rector magnificus of Uppsala University. Sundqvist was educated at Uppsala University, where he received his PhD in Nuclear Physics. He was appointed professor of Ion physics in 1987, and elected rector magnificus in 1997, a position he held until his retirement on 30 June 2006. He was president of the Association of Swedish Higher Education, a co-operative body for more than 40 institutions of higher education in Sweden, in 2005–2006.

#4124

Roy Sambles

#67588

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Sir John Roy Sambles is an English experimental physicist and a former President of the Institute of Physics. Sambles, originally from Callington in Cornwall, studied physics at Imperial College, London, gaining his BSc and PhD degrees there, and has since published over 550 papers in international journals. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2002.

#4125

Robert Pecora

#112157

Overall Influence

#4126

Yuri Yappa

#85386

Overall Influence

1927 - 1998 (71 years)

Yuri Andreevich Yappa was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist. He is known for publications on particle physics, quantum field theory, General Relativity, philosophy of science, and for his graduate texts on classical electrodynamics and theory of spinors.

#4127

Per Olof Hulth

#99522

Overall Influence

1943 - 2015 (72 years)

Per Olof Hulth was a Swedish astroparticle physicist. Hulth grew up in Stockholm. He graduated with a PhD degree in particle physics in 1976 from Stockholm University, the same university where he later for many years was Professor of Experimental Astroparticle Physics and in the late 1990s headed the Department of Physics. Hulth also worked at CERN in Geneva and was one of the key European participants in the AMANDA project at the South Pole, as well as its successor experiment IceCube, designed to study neutrinos from space in the polar cap ice. He was spokesperson of the IceCube collaborat...

#4128

Robert C. Weast

#112234

Overall Influence

#4129

Werner Sieghart

#112249

Overall Influence

#4130

Karlis Kaufmanis

#30908

Overall Influence

1910 - 2003 (93 years)

Kārlis Kaufmanis was a Latvian-American astronomer. He is noted for his theory, on which he delivered a public lecture more than a thousand times, that the Star of Bethlehem was a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn that took place in 7 BC. He was also the author of several textbooks on astronomy, mathematics, and cosmology.

#4131

Jin Wang

#112275

Overall Influence

#4132

David Healy

#108750

Overall Influence

1936 - 2011 (75 years)

David B. Healy was an American astrophotographer and asteroid discoverer who is known for his contributions to Burnham's Celestial Handbook. History David B. Healy was born 1936 in Los Angeles, California. He was an automotive industry analyst for Drexel Burnham in New York and later a stock broker before retiring to Arizona. He dedicated his life to Astronomy and the discovery of planets. While in New York, he was a longtime member of the Astronomical Society of Long Island. Once in Sierra Vista, Arizona, he became a valued member of the Huachuca Astronomy Club.

#4133

William Charles Feldman

#112302

Overall Influence

#4134

Mustansir Barma

#99340

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Mustansir Barma is an Indian scientist specializing in Statistical Physics. He was former Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research from 2007 to 2014. Awards and honours Young Scientist Award of the Indian National Science Academy .Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences .Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for the Physical Sciences awarded by the CSIR .Honorary faculty member, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore .DAE Raja Ramanna Prize Lecture in Physics .S.N. Bose Birth Centenary Award of the Indian Science Congress .J.C. Bose Fellowship of the Dep...

#4135

Philip I. Marcus

#112310

Overall Influence

#4136

Valerii Vinokour

#95771

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

#4137

George T. Reynolds

George T. Reynolds

#79174

Overall Influence

1917 - 2005 (88 years)

George Thomas Reynolds was an American physicist best known for his accomplishments in particle physics, biophysics and environmental science. Reynolds received his PhD in physics from Princeton in 1943, writing a thesis of the propagation of shock waves. During World War II, he joined the United States Navy, and served with the Manhattan Project. He worked with George Kistiakowsky on the design of the explosive lenses required by the implosion-type nuclear weapon. He was involved in the investigation of the Port Chicago disaster, served with Project Alberta on Tinian, and was part of the Ma...

#4138

Helen Gleeson

#66701

Overall Influence

Helen Frances Gleeson OBE FInstP is a British physicist who specialises in soft matter and liquid crystals. She is Cavendish Professor and former Head of the School of Physics at the University of Leeds.

#4139

Suchitra Sebastian

#62674

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Suchitra Sebastian is a condensed matter physicist at Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. She is known for her discoveries of exotic quantum phenomena that emerge in complex materials. In particular, she is known for the discovery of unconventional insulating materials which display simultaneous conduction-like behaviour. In 2022 she was awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize by the Breakthrough Foundation. She was named as one of thirty Exceptional Young Scientists by the World Economic Forum in 2013, one of The Next Big Names in Physics by the Financial Times in 2013, and spoke...

#4140

Stefan Schuster

Stefan Schuster

#52074

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Stefan Schuster is a German biophysicist. He is professor for bioinformatics at the University of Jena. Life Stefan Schuster studied biophysics at the Humboldt University Berlin and wrote his PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Reinhart Heinrich at the Department of Theoretical Biophysics at Humboldt University, Berlin . In 2003 he got a professorship at the Department of Bioinformatics at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena.

#4141

Jussi Toppari

#112356

Overall Influence

#4142

Panayiotis Varotsos

Panayiotis Varotsos

#78224

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Panayiotis Varotsos is a Greek physicist and former professor in the Department of Physics of the University of Athens, notable for his VAN method to predict earthquakes. His group claims the ability to identify electromagnetic signals that are precursors to earthquakes. They suggest the precursors are generated by electricity from piezo-stimulated effects in rocks being stressed just prior to the earthquake rupture. Onassis Foundation Laureate for the Environment . Also awarded by the Academy of Athens and Empeirikion Foundation . In 2016 the Union of Greek Physicists honoured him for his ...

#4143

Denise Stephens

Denise Stephens

#92125

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Denise C. Nuttall Stephens is an associate professor of astronomy in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University. Education and research experience Stephens graduated from Brigham Young University in 1996 as an undergraduate student with a degree in physics. She received her Master's and Ph.D. in Astronomy from New Mexico State University. She completed her a postgraduate program at the Space Telescope Science Institute and at Johns Hopkins University. She joined the faculty of BYU in 2007. She studies the atmosphere ...

#4144

Daniel Q. Posin

Daniel Q. Posin

#40022

Overall Influence

1909 - 2003 (94 years)

Daniel Q. Posin was an American physicist. He was born in 1909 in Russian Turkestan, close to the Caspian Sea. When he was six years old his family fled the Russian revolution, and in a journey that took three years he made it to Mongolia and finally to the United States, the final leg of the journey on a cattle boat to San Francisco. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and earning a Ph.D. in physics.

#4145

Robert Sutton Harrington

Robert Sutton Harrington

#100469

Overall Influence

1942 - 1993 (51 years)

Robert Sutton Harrington was an American astronomer who worked at the United States Naval Observatory . Harrington was born near Newport News, Virginia. His father was an archaeologist. He was married to Betty-Jean Maycock in 1976, with two daughters, Amy and Ann.

#4146

Stuart M. Mcgill

#112417

Overall Influence

#4147

Timothy Cameron Ralph

#112432

Overall Influence

#4148

Mary Beth Monroe

#112184

Overall Influence

1947 - 2013 (66 years)

Mary Beth Todd Monroe was an American physics educator, the president-elect of the American Association of Physics Teachers and a professor of physics at Southwest Texas Junior College. Education and career Monroe majored in physics at Sam Houston State University, graduating in 1970. She became a secondary-school physics teacher while continuing to study laser science with Charles Manka at Sam Houston State, earning a master's degree in 1973.

#4149

Theodore Litovitz

#103484

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Theodore Aaron Litovitz was physics professor at The Catholic University of America and a prolific inventor. His inventions include a method to safely store nuclear waste, an electronic chip to shield cell phone users from harmful electromagnetic radiation, and some of the early fiber optics now used in telecommunications. Litovitz held 25 patents, and was the co-founder of Catholic University's Vitreous State Laboratory, where students used vitrification to immobilize radioactive waste. The process he pioneered is expected to save 20 years and $20 billion in cleanup costs at the government'...

#4150

Abhishek Dhar

#99304

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Abhishek Dhar is an Indian physicist specialising in statistical physics and condensed matter physics. He is a Professor in the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore. Education and Career Dhar obtained his PhD in 1998 from the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. His doctoral advisor was Deepak Dhar. He did post-doctoral research at Indian Institute of Science, Raman Research Institute and University of California, Santa Cruz. Dhar then became a faculty member of the Raman Research Institute and later joined the International Cent...

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