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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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#4451

Rolf Rossaint

#117317

Overall Influence

#4452

Matthew Koss

#89777

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Matthew B. Koss is a widely published solid-state physicist. Biography Koss received his AB degree from Vassar College in 1983 and a Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from Tufts University in 1989.

#4453

Yang Liming

#34819

Overall Influence

1919 - 2003 (84 years)

Yang Liming , also known as Li-Ming Yang, was a Chinese theoretical physicist and professor at Peking University. A doctoral student of the Nobel laureate Max Born, he made contributions to the research of nuclear shell structure, many-body theory, and the interacting boson model. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991, together with his wife, computer scientist Xia Peisu.

#4454

Donald Blackwell

#108733

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Donald Eustace Blackwell was a British astronomer, who was Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1960 to 1988. He studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and was later appointed as Assistant Director of the university's Solar Physics Observatory, a position that he held from 1950 to 1960. During his career, he visited several countries to carry out astronomical investigations, including Fiji, Bolivia and Canada. He was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1973 to 1975. He held his Oxford professorship in conjunction with a fellowship of New Coll...

#4455

Philip B. Allen

#117409

Overall Influence

#4456

James H. Hurley

#54100

Overall Influence

James Hurley is a university professor known for his research into proteins. He won the 2014 Neurath Award from the Protein Society for a unique, recent contribution to basic science. Education Hurley trained in protein crystallography with Robert Stroud at the University of California, San Francisco, where he completed a PhD in biophysics in 1990. He also trained with Brian Matthews at the University of Oregon, where he was a postdoctoral fellow from 1990 to 1992.

#4457

Herbert Levine

#116450

Overall Influence

Herbert Levine is an American physicist, a University Distinguished Professor of Physics and Bioengineering at Northeastern University. He is also co-director of a National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center devoted to theoretical biological physics. His research focuses on physical modeling of cancer progression, metastasis and interaction with the immune system.

#4458

Jacob Pontoppidan Thyssen

#117443

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

#4459

Amir Yacoby

#85708

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Amir Yacoby is a condensed matter physicist and professor at Harvard University. In 1994 he obtained his PhD at Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of professor Moty Heiblum and was appointed as the Lazaridis Chair in Physics of Institute for Quantum Computing in 2013. In March 2014, his group developed a magnetic resonance imaging technology by which nanoscale images can be provided, that could enable researchers to peer into atomic structure of individual molecules. In 2014, Yacoby was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#4460

Robert Ledley

#12822

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Robert Steven Ledley , professor of physiology and biophysics and professor of radiology at Georgetown University School of Medicine, pioneered the use of electronic digital computers in biology and medicine. In 1959, he wrote two influential articles in Science: "Reasoning Foundations of Medical Diagnosis" and "Digital Electronic Computers in Biomedical Science". Both articles encouraged biomedical researchers and physicians to adopt computer technology.

#4461

Oliver Keith Baker

#94340

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Oliver Keith Baker is an American experimental particle physicist and astrophysicist, best known for his work on the Higgs boson and dark matter. In 2002, he won the Edward Alexander Bouchet Award of the American Physical Society: "For his contribution to nuclear and particle physics; for building the infrastructure to do these measurements; and for being active in outreach activities, both locally and nationally."

#4462

Thomas J. Balonek

#102344

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Thomas J. Balonek is a professor of physics and astronomy at Colgate University. He studies optical and radio emissions from galactic centers and quasars, and is a multiple discoverer of minor planets.

#4463

Ezio Ghigo

#117524

Overall Influence

#4464

Stéphan Narison

#117556

Overall Influence

#4465

Reinhard Schlickeiser

#117570

Overall Influence

#4466

Hamish Robertson

#111842

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Robert Graham Hamish Robertson is a Canadian–American experimental physicist, specializing in neutrino physics. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, where he was formerly the director of the University of Washington's Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics.

#4467

Robert G. Chambers

#78839

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Robert G. Chambers was a British physicist. He won the 1994 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society "for his many contributions to solid-state physics, in particular his ingenious and technically demanding experiment which verified the Aharonov–Bohm effect concerning the behaviour of charged particles in magnetic fields"

#4468

David Ciardi

#86068

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

David Robert Ciardi is an American astronomer. He received a bachelor's degree in physics and astronomy from Boston University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wyoming in 1997.

#4469

Christine Charles

#89525

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Christine Charles is a physicist at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, an inventor, researcher and science communicator. Her position at the Australian National University is director of the Space Plasma, Power and Propulsion Laboratory.

#4470

Louis Schlapbach

#117641

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

#4471

Frank Read

#111761

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Frank Henry Read is a British physicist. He is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester. Research Read is known for his experimental studies of electron collisions with atoms and molecules, for associated work in instrument design, and for theoretical work on the interpretation of the experimental results. He made advances in the study of threshold effects in electron collisions, and of post-collision interactions in the near-threshold excitation of resonance states.

#4472

James A. Piper

#66400

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

James A. Piper was a New Zealand/Australian physicist, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Physics at Macquarie University. Piper studied physics at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and received a B.Sc. in 1968. He completed a Ph.D. in atomic physics, also at Otago, in 1971. His post-doctoral research was on metal-vapour lasers, with Colin Webb at Oxford.

#4473

Uri Feldman

#117693

Overall Influence

#4474

Daniel Pieter Joubert

#117720

Overall Influence

#4475

Fred Tappert

#78770

Overall Influence

1940 - 2002 (62 years)

Frederick Drach Tappert was an American physicist whose primary contributions were in underwater acoustics. He is noted for the development of the parabolic equation model and split-step Fourier algorithm for electromagnetic and ocean acoustic propagation.

#4476

Francesco Sannino

Francesco Sannino

#102688

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Francesco Sannino is an Italian theoretical physicist and a professor at the University of Southern Denmark. He conducts research in the topics of effective field theories and their applications to strongly coupled theories such as quantum chromodynamics. He also researches in beyond standard model physics and quantum field theory.

#4477

Charles M. Rick

#58012

Overall Influence

1915 - 2002 (87 years)

Charles Madera Rick was a plant geneticist and botanist who pioneered research on the origins of the tomato. He was widely regarded as the world's leading authority on tomato biology. Born in 1915 in Reading, PA, Rick earned a bachelor's degree in horticulture in 1937 from Pennsylvania State University. He earned a doctoral degree in genetics from Harvard University in 1940 and joined the Vegetable Crops Department at the University of California, Davis in 1940. On retirement from the University of California in 1981 he became professor emeritus and continued his research and lecturing for doctoral students till his late days.

#4478

Sharon K. Davis

Sharon K. Davis

#95191

Overall Influence

Sharon K. Davis is an American social epidemiologist. She is a senior scientist and head of the Social Epidemiology Research Unit at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Education Davis completed a B.A. from University of Arkansas in 1980. She earned a M.Ed. from Northeastern University in 1983. In 1987, she completed a M.P.A. from John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She earned a Ph.D. from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in 1991. Her dissertation was titled Assessing the effect of Medicare's Prospective Payment System ...

#4479

Neil Ashby

#101688

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Neil Ashby is an American physicist. He attended Dalhart High School, graduating in 1951. He received his B.A. degree in physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1955, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1956 and 1961, respectively. After spending a year in Europe as a postdoctoral fellow, he joined the faculty of the department of physics at the University of Colorado in 1962. He has been a professor of physics there since 1970, and was department chair from 1984 to 1988. He is currently professor emeritus – theoretical math-physi...

#4480

Robert Louis Kurucz

#117820

Overall Influence

#4481

Giovanni Felder

#49401

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Giovanni Felder is a Swiss mathematical physicist and mathematician, working at ETH Zurich. He specializes in algebraic and geometric properties of integrable models of statistical mechanics and quantum field theory.

#4482

Donald Kouri

#77902

Overall Influence

1938 - 2021 (83 years)

Donald J. Kouri was an American physicist and Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston. He completed his PhD from University of Wisconsin in 1965. Research interest Donald J Kouri carried out research in the fundamental implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the resulting applications and also generalized coherent states. He has also pioneered the research in quantum theory of atomic collisions and molecular collisions.

#4483

Mahananda Dasgupta

#87518

Overall Influence

Mahananda Dasgupta FAA, FAIP, FAPS is an experimental physicist at the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility in the Department of Nuclear Physics of the Australian National University, whose work focuses on accelerator-based nuclear fusion and fission.

#4484

Bianca Dittrich

#88167

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Bianca Dittrich is a German theoretical physicist known for her contributions to loop quantum gravity and the spin foam approach to quantum gravity. She has been a faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada since 2012. She is also currently an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo.

#4485

Giorgio Benedek

#77354

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Giorgio Benedek is an Italian physicist, academic and researcher. He is an Emeritus Professor of Physics of Matter at University of Milano-Bicocca and Director of the International School of Solid State Physics at Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture.

#4486

Vincent Mckoy

#117908

Overall Influence

#4487

Lydia Bieri

#88526

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Lydia Rosina Bieri is a Swiss-American applied mathematician, geometric analyst, mathematical physicist, cosmologist, and historian of science whose research concerns general relativity, gravity waves, and gravitational memory effects. She is a professor of mathematics and director of the Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics at the University of Michigan.

#4488

Francesco Petruccione

#117419

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Francesco Petruccione AAS,ASSAf is a physicist and academic leader currently serving as a professor of Physics at Stellenbosch University and the interim director of the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences . With a wealth of experience in his field, he previously held the position of professor and Pro Vice-Chancellor of Big Data and Informatics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal . Petruccione is also a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa.

#4489

Kai Puolamäki

#60634

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Kai Puolamäki is a Finnish physicist and Internet activist. He has been a vocal spokesman of the Finnish anti-copyright movement. Academic career Puolamäki graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1996. In 2001 he presented his doctoral thesis titled Breaking of R-parity and supersymmetry in supersymmetric models. His earlier publications in physics have included articles on the Higgs boson.

#4490

Hermann Flaschka

#32828

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Hermann Flaschka was an Austrian-American mathematical physicist and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona, known for his important contributions in completely integrable systems . Childhood Flaschka had lived in the USA since his family immigrated when he was a teenager. They lived in Atlanta, GA. His father Hermenegild Arved Flaschka taught Chemistry at Georgia Tech. Hermann graduated from Druid Hills High School with the class of 1962 and received his Bachelor's degree at Georgia Tech in 1967. Among other achievements there he also received the "William Gilmer Perry Awa...

#4491

Lloyd Cross

#60217

Overall Influence

Lloyd Cross is an American physicist and holographer. As a physicist, Cross' research started in the 1950s, and focused primarily on masers and lasers at Willow Run Laboratories, at the University of Michigan. He first demonstrated maser action in a ruby crystal in 1957 and, as of 1960, Cross co-led a project group to design, build and operate a ruby maser preamplifier for a new radio telescope located at Peach Mountain, about 20 miles north of Ann Arbor. In 1968, he and Canadian sculptor Jerry Pethick, developed a simplistic stabilization system for holographic cameras, that for the first tim...

#4492

Hans-Dieter Betz

#85137

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Hans-Dieter Betz is a German professor emeritus of experimental physics. Fields of research Beside atomic physics Betz searched on Sferics, where he leads a science-group on the Munich Ludwig-Maximilians-University.

#4493

Lori Glaze

#94165

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Lori Glaze is an American scientist and the director of NASA's Science Mission Directorate's Planetary Science Division. She was a member of the Inner Planets Panel during the most recent Planetary Science Decadal Survey, and has had a role on the Executive Committee of NASA's Venus Exploration Analysis Group for several years, serving as the group's Chair since 2013.

#4494

Peter D. Jarvis

#53580

Overall Influence

Peter D. Jarvis is an Australian physicist notable for his work on applications of group theory to physical problems, particularly supersymmetry in the genetic code. He has also applied classical invariant theory to problems of quantum physics , and also to phylogenetic reconstruction .

#4495

Eric Gouaux

#118026

Overall Influence

#4496

Alexey Anselm

#102417

Overall Influence

1934 - 1998 (64 years)

Alexey Andreevich Anselm was a Russian theoretical physicist, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, professor, director of the B.P. Konstantinov Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute , member of: the Russian and American Physical Society, the executive committee of the Nuclear Physics Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the editorial board of the Russian journal “Yadernaya Fizika”.

#4497

Alain E. Kaloyeros

#70454

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Alain E. Kaloyeros is an American physicist and was the founding president and chief executive officer of the SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica, New York. Early life and education Kaloyeros was born in Beirut to a Lebanese mother and Greek father. His family is Greek Orthodox Christian. He attended Lebanese University and graduated with a License D’Enseignement in Mathematics and Physics with honors and left Lebanon in 1980 for graduate school in Florida at the University of Miami, and he transferred to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Kaloyeros graduated from The University of...

#4498

William J. Thaler

#80255

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

William J. Thaler, Ph.D. was an American experimental physicist. Working for the Office of Naval Research at the Naval Research Laboratory in the 1950s, Thaler developed an early warning system to detect the launching of ballistic missiles using high frequency radio waves bounced between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere, part of the upper atmosphere.

#4499

Barbara A. Williams

#75728

Overall Influence

Barbara Ann Williams is an American radio astronomer and the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astronomy . Her research largely focused on compact galaxy groups, in particular observations of their emissions in the H I region in order to build up a larger scale picture of the structure and evolution of galaxies. Williams was named as the Outstanding Young Woman of America in 1986 and is currently a retired Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware.

#4500

Manasse Mbonye

#90791

Overall Influence

Manasse Mbonye is a theoretical astrophysicist born in Gahini, Rwanda. He is currently Executive Secretary of the National Council for Science and Technology in Kigali. Early life and education Mbonye's parents were teachers. His high school education was at Nyakasura School in Uganda. He attended Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, then obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Connecticut in 1996. His Ph.D. dissertation on “Gravitational Perturbations of Radiating Spacetimes” along with his founding of and activities in the “Rwanda Education Reconstruction Effort” earned him the 1996 Ph.D.

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