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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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#4401

George Gloeckler George Gloeckler

#116518

Overall Influence

#4402

Jook Walraven

#110538

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Joannes Theodorus Maria Walraven is a Dutch experimental physicist at the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute for experimental physics in Amsterdam. From 1967 he studied physics at the University of Amsterdam. Both his doctoral research and PhD research was with Isaac Silvera, on the subject of Bose-Einstein Condensation. Because of the difficulty of his research subject, his promotion took six years instead of four. The aim of his PhD research was to make a gas of atomic hydrogen, which could become the world's first quantum gas. This might then be a suitable candidate for a Bose-Einstein Conden...

#4403

David Larry Fried

#116549

Overall Influence

#4404

François Hild

#116553

Overall Influence

#4405

Pierre Sabatier

#87020

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Pierre Célestin Sabatier was a French physicist. Biography Pierre Célestin Sabatier was born in Casablanca, Morocco on 11 July 1935. The grand-nephew of François Nau, he graduated from École Normale Supérieure, Paris in physics and mathematics in 1958 then spent a year in Princeton University where he was a pupil of Professor Eugene Wigner. He was awarded his doctorate at the Paris-Sud 11 University in 1966. He had worked on scattering theory, and, during the two years he had to serve in the French Navy, on coastal engineering and applied geophysics. His conclusions of the first interdiscipli...

#4406

Ronald Boellaard

#116573

Overall Influence

#4407

Warren B. Mori

#107171

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Warren Bicknell Mori is an American computational plasma physicist and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was awarded the 2020 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for his contributions to the theory and computer simulations of non-linear processes in plasma-based acceleration using kinetic theory, as well as for his research in relativistically intense lasers and beam-plasma interactions.

#4408

C. Peter Flynn

#102117

Overall Influence

1935 - 2011 (76 years)

C. Peter Flynn was a Professor of Physics and of Materials Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Flynn was on the faculty of the University of Illinois from 1960 until 2011 and served as the director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory from 1978 until 1987. He was a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Society for Metals, and was Chairman of the Department of Energy Council on Materials between 1985 and 2005.

#4409

Karolin Luger

#67852

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Karolin Luger is an Austrian-American biochemist and biophysicist known for her work with nucleosomes and discovery of the three-dimensional structure of chromatin. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and works with the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.

#4410

Irwin A. Oppenheim

#116664

Overall Influence

#4411

Aleksandra Radenovic

#39582

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Aleksandra Radenovic is a Swiss and Croatian biophysicist. Her research focuses on the development of experimental tools to study single-molecule biophysics. She is a professor of biological engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and head of the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology.

#4412

John Rodenburg

#82810

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

John Marius Rodenburg is Professor in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Sheffield. Education Rodenburg was educated at University of Exeter where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics with Electronics. He moved to the Cavendish Laboratory to complete his PhD on the detection and interpretation of electron diffraction patterns which was awarded by the University of Cambridge in 1986.

#4413

Terry A. Miller

#116706

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

#4414

Sergei V. Bulanov

#111020

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Sergei Vladimirovich Bulanov, is a Russian physicist. He received the 1983 State Prize of the USSR, the 2016 Hannes Alfvén Prize for "contributions to the development of large-scale next-step devices in high-temperature plasma physics research", and the Order of Rising Sun with Gold Rays and Rosette in 2020.

#4415

Vladimir Edmund Bondybey

#116720

Overall Influence

#4416

Grzegorz Wrochna

Grzegorz Wrochna

#62710

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Grzegorz Jacek Wrochna is a Polish physicist who is serving as the President of the Polish Space Agency since 2021. Before his nomination to this position, he was the director of the National Center for Nuclear Research from 2011 to 2015, and an under-secretary in the Ministry of Science and Higher Education from 2019 to 2021.

#4417

Ilhan Arif. Aksay

#116787

Overall Influence

#4418

Dieter Vollhardt

#116795

Overall Influence

#4419

Philip C. Myers

#116809

Overall Influence

#4420

Massimo Marezio

#116812

Overall Influence

#4421

Laura Cadonati

#91109

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Laura Cadonati is an American physicist who specializes in gravitational waves. Career Cadonati completed her PhD at Princeton University in 2001 with her thesis The Borexino Solar Neutrino Experiment and its Scintillator Containment Vessel. She was an associate professor in the physics department at University of Massachusetts Amherst before moving to the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015.

#4422

Nalin de Silva

#15359

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Thakurartha Devadithya Guardiyawasam Lindamulage Nalin Kumara de Silva is a Sri Lankan philosopher and a political analyst. He is the former Sri Lankan ambassador in Myanmar. He was a professor in the department of mathematics, a member of University Grant Commission and the dean of the faculty of science at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.

#4423

Juan Gualterio Roederer

#63217

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Juan G. Roederer is a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks . His research fields are space physics, psychoacoustics, science policy and information theory. He conducted pioneering research on solar cosmic rays, on the theory of earth's radiation belts, neural networks for pitch processing, and currently on the foundations of information theory. He is also an accomplished organist.

#4424

Chandrashekhar J. Joshi

#85663

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Chandrashekhar "Chan" Janardan Joshi is an Indian–American experimental plasma physicist. He is known for his pioneering work in plasma-based particle acceleration techniques for which he won the 2006 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics and the 2023 Hannes Alfvén Prize .

#4425

Aihud Pevsner

#98844

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

Aihud Pevsner was an American experimental physicist who was the lead researcher credited with the discovery of the Eta meson. Born in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, to Yoshua Pevsner and Esther Ben-Yeshaia, Aihud Pevsner immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of three. The family, of Belarusian-Jewish descent, settled in New York. Pevsner served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1945, and married Lucille Wolf in 1949.

#4426

Masahito Hayashi

#116930

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

#4427

Paolo Palatini

#116931

Overall Influence

#4428

Mark Birkinshaw

#113765

Overall Influence

Mark Birkinshaw was a British physicist who held the William P. Coldrick chair in Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Bristol. He was the first to detect the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect. Birkinshaw died in 2023.

#4429

John Kormendy

#97095

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

John Kormendy , is an American astronomer, currently the Curtis T. Vaughn, Jr. Centennial Chair at University of Texas at Austin. He is known for the Kormendy relation found in the surface brightness profiles for elliptic galaxies.

#4430

Thomas C. Katsouleas

Thomas C. Katsouleas

#47802

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Thomas Christos Katsouleas is an American physicist, engineer, and academic administrator. In February 2019, he was named the 16th president of the University of Connecticut and officially began his term in August. He resigned the presidency in 2021 and returned to the faculty.

#4431

Rafi Bistritzer

#82706

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Rafi Bistritzer is an Israeli physicist, and manager of an algorithms group at Applied Materials. He is the winner of the 2020 Wolf Prize in Physics, together with Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Alan MacDonald, for “pioneering theoretical and experimental work on twisted bilayer graphene.”

#4432

Matthias Troyer

#117047

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

#4433

Sten Odenwald

#80049

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Sten Felix Odenwald is an American astronomer, author, and NASA scientist-educator. Odenwald has worked as part of the NASA Cosmic Background Explorer, Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment investigating the cosmic infrared background. He has published four books: The Astronomy Cafe, The 23rd Cycle, Patterns in the Void and Back to the Astronomy Cafe. He has also appeared in a number of TV and radio documentaries on astronomy and space weather. Since receiving his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University in 1982, he has been an astronomer in the Washington, D.C. area, primarily at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

#4434

Cynthia H. Mccollough

#117064

Overall Influence

#4435

Lynn Cominsky

#90024

Overall Influence

Lynn Cominsky is an American astrophysicist and educator. She was the Chair of Astronomy and Physics at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California from August 2004 through August 2019. She is currently the Project Director for the NASA Education and Public Outreach Group.

#4436

Morten Bo Madsen

Morten Bo Madsen

#53801

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Morten Bo Madsen is a Danish physicist, associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute. He was a co-investigator on the Phoenix Mars mission which proved the presence of water on Mars. Early career In 1989, Madsen joined the Mössbauer spectroscopy group led by Jens Martin Knudsen at the University of Copenhagen. During the 1990s, their research focused on studies of the planet Mars and, based on the ideas of "The Martian", Jens Martin Knudsen formed the Danish Mars Group. This soon spurred a sister-group, the Mars Simulation Laboratory, in Århus, an initiative by Erik Uggerhøj and Per Nørnbe...

#4437

Darrell F. Strobel

#117117

Overall Influence

#4438

Roberto Morandotti

Roberto Morandotti

#109494

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Roberto Morandotti is a physicist and full Professor, working in the Energy Materials Telecommunications Department of the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique . The work of his team includes the areas of integrated and quantum photonics, nonlinear and singular optics, as well as terahertz photonics.

#4439

John Johnson

#104303

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

John Asher Johnson is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at Harvard. He is the first tenured African-American physical science professor in the history of the university. Johnson is well known for discovering three of the first known planets smaller than the Earth outside of the solar system, including the first Mars-sized exoplanet.

#4440

Lester F. Eastman

#117137

Overall Influence

#4441

Prinya Chindaprasirt

#117150

Overall Influence

#4442

Luc Vinet

#54125

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Luc Vinet is a Canadian physicist and mathematician. He was former rector of the Université de Montréal between 2005 and 2010. He is the CEO of IVADO, created in 2015 since August 2021. Biography Born in Montreal, Quebec, Vinet holds a doctorate from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie and a PhD from the Université de Montréal, both in theoretical physics. After two years as Research Associate at MIT, he was appointed in the early 1980s as faculty member in the Physics Department at the Université de Montréal. He has held a number of visiting professorships at various universities. He is the author or co-author of ten books and more than three hundred scientific papers.

#4443

Lubomír Dvořák

#117160

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Prof. Ing. Lubomír Dvořák, CSc. is a Czech scientist specialising in experimental physics. From 1997 to 2000 and again between 2006 and 2010 he was Rector of the Palacký University of Olomouc. Between 1993 and 1997 and again from 2003 till 2006 he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Science at Olomouc. Since 2010 he has been University Vice-Rector for Regional Development, one of seven vice-rectors currently at Olomouc.

#4444

Martin A. Billeter

#117162

Overall Influence

#4445

Humphrey Maris

#91859

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Humphrey J. Maris is a physicist and a professor at Brown University. He studies cryogenics. In 1991 he was made the George Chase Professor of Natural Science. He has led experiments into the nature of the quantum state of the electron. Awarded the 2011 Fritz London Memorial Prize by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

#4446

David DeMille

#109600

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

David P. DeMille is an American physicist and Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his use of polar diatomic molecules to search for symmetry-violating effects within the molecules and as a means for manipulating the external properties of the molecules.

#4447

Michelle Girvan

#75292

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Michelle Girvan is an American physicist and network scientist whose research combines methods from dynamical systems, graph theory, and statistical mechanics and applies them to problems including epidemiology, gene regulation, and the study of Information cascades. She is one of the namesakes of the Girvan–Newman algorithm, used to detect community structure in complex systems.

#4448

Tsun‐kong Sham

#117214

Overall Influence

#4449

Tito Arecchi

#83708

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Tito Arecchi was an Italian physicist who made significant contributions to laser physics and quantum optics. Biography Arecchi graduated from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1957 with a degree in electrical engineering. He became an assistant professor at the University of Milan in 1963 and a physics professor at the University of Pavia in 1970. From 1975 until his retirement in 2008, he was a physics professor at the University of Florence. He also served as a guest professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1969 to 1970 and was invited to IBM research laboratories i...

#4450

Serena Viti

#110502

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Serena Viti is a professor at Leiden University and previously was a professor and the head of Astrophysics at University College London. In March 2019 she received an ERC Advanced Grant for her MOPPEX proposal .

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