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

#551

Sébastien Candel

#23541

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Sébastien Candel is a French physicist, Emeritus Professor of École Centrale Paris. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 for significant contributions to solving multidisciplinary problems in the fields of combustion, fluid mechanics, aeroacoustics, and propulsion.

#552

Daniel L. Simmons

#23583

Overall Influence

Daniel L. Simmons is a professor of chemistry and former director of the Cancer Research Center at Brigham Young University . He was the discoverer of the COX-2 enzyme that is the target of celecoxib and other COX-2 inhibitors. He and BYU felt that Pfizer had not properly credited or paid them for Simmons work in this development and brought a suit against Pfizer.

#553

James Duderstadt

James Duderstadt

#23619

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

James Johnson Duderstadt was the President of the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996. Duderstadt was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1987 for significant contributions to nuclear science and engineering relating to fission and fusion energy systems and reactor theory and design.

#554

Erik Winfree

#23675

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Erik Winfree is an American applied computer scientist, bioengineer, and professor at California Institute of Technology. He is a leading researcher into DNA computing and DNA nanotechnology. In 1998, Winfree in collaboration with Nadrian Seeman published the creation of two-dimensional lattices of DNA tiles using the "double crossover" motif. These tile-based structures provided the capability to implement DNA computing, which was demonstrated by Winfree and Paul Rothemund in 2004, and for which they shared the 2006 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology.

#555

Charles H. Henry

Charles H. Henry

#23723

Overall Influence

1937 - 2016 (79 years)

Charles H. Henry was an American physicist. He was born in Chicago, Illinois. He received an M.S. degree in physics in 1959 from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. degree in physics in 1965 from the University of Illinois, under the direction of Charlie Slichter. In March 2008, he was featured in an article in the Physics Illinois News, a publication of the Physics Department of the University of Illinois.

#556

John Madey

#23731

Overall Influence

1943 - 2016 (73 years)

John M. J. Madey was a professor of Physics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, a former director of the Free Electron Laser Laboratory at Duke University, and formerly a professor at Stanford University. He is best known for his development of the free-electron laser at Stanford University in the 1970s.

#557

Clifford Martin Will

#23747

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Clifford Martin Will is a Canadian-born theoretical physicist noted for his contributions to general relativity. Life and work Will was born in Hamilton, Ontario. In 1968, he earned a B.Sc. from McMaster University. At Caltech, he studied under Kip Thorne, earning his Ph.D. in 1971. He has taught at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, and in 1981 joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. In 2012, he moved to a faculty position at the University of Florida.

#558

Leonard Carlitz

#23751

Overall Influence

1907 - 1999 (92 years)

Leonard Carlitz was an American mathematician. Carlitz supervised 44 doctorates at Duke University and published over 770 papers. Chronology 1907 Born Philadelphia, PA, USA1927 BA, University of Pennsylvania1930 PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 1930 under Howard Mitchell, who had studied under Oswald Veblen at Princeton1930–31 at Caltech with E. T. Bell1931 married Clara Skaler1931–32 at Cambridge with G. H. Hardy1932 Joined the faculty of Duke University where he served for 45 years1938 to 1973 Editorial Board Duke Mathematical Journal 1939 Birth of son Michael1940 Supervision of his first doctoral student E.

#559

Ganesan Venkatasubramanian

#23767

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Ganesan Venkatasubramanian is an Indian psychiatrist and clinician-scientist who works as a professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore . His overarching research interest to learn the science that will facilitate a personalized approach to understand and treat severe mental disorders like schizophrenia. Venkatasubramanian is known for his studies in the fields of schizophrenia, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation , brain imaging, neuroimmunology, neurometabolism and several other areas of biological psychiatry. The Council of Scientifi...

#560

Thomas Snyder

#23781

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Thomas Snyder is an American puzzle creator and world-champion sudoku and logic puzzle solver. He is the first person to win both the World Sudoku Championship and the World Puzzle Championship. Snyder writes a puzzle blog as Dr. Sudoku.

#561

David States

#23818

Overall Influence

David J. States is an American biophysicist who is Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan. His research group is using computational methods to understand the human genome and how it relates to the human proteome. He is the Director of the Michigan NIH Bioinformatics Training Progra] and a Senior Scientist in the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics.

#562

Bernard F. Schutz

#23873

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Bernard F. Schutz FInstP FLSW is an American and naturalised British physicist. He is well known for his research in Einstein's theory of general relativity, especially for his contributions to the detection of gravitational waves, and for his textbooks. Schutz is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is a professor of physics and astronomy at Cardiff University, and was a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, where he led the Astrophysical Relativity division from 1995 to 2014. Schutz was...

#563

Alexander Klibanov

#23880

Overall Influence

Alexander Klibanov is the Novartis Professor of Biological Engineering and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for research in enzyme and protein technology and contributions to the field of biocatalysis in nonaqueous solvents.

#564

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 .

#565

Urmila Mahadev

#23930

Overall Influence

Urmila Mahadev is an American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for her work in quantum computing and quantum cryptography. Education and career Mahadev is originally from Los Angeles, where her parents are physicians. She became interested in quantum computing through a course with Leonard Adleman at the University of Southern California, where she graduated in 2010.

#566

Qian Xuesen

#24088

Overall Influence

1911 - 2009 (98 years)

Qian Xuesen, or Hsue-shen Tsien , was a Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. Qian received his undergraduate education in mechanical engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai in 1934 and took a pre-departure transitional year in aircraft design at National Tsinghua University in Beijing. He travelled to the United States in 1935 and attained a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Afterward, he joined Theodo...

#567

John S. Waugh

#24108

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

John Stewart Waugh was an American chemist and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for developing average hamiltonian theory and using it to extend NMR spectroscopy, previously limited to liquids, to the solid state. He is the author of ANTIOPE, a freeware general purpose Windows-based simulator of the spectra and dynamics of nuclear magnetic resonance . He has also used systems of a few coupled spinss to illustrate the general requirements for equilibrium and ergodicity in isolated systems.

#568

William L. Burke

#24112

Overall Influence

1941 - 1996 (55 years)

William Lionel Burke was an astronomy, astrophysics, and physics professor at UC Santa Cruz. He is also the author of Spacetime, Geometry, Cosmology , and of Applied differential geometry , a text expounding the virtues of differential forms over vector calculus for theoretical physics. Bill also has a draft of a 3rd book reachable on the web [|Div, Grad, Curl are Dead].

#569

Telle Whitney

#24128

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Telle Whitney is the former CEO and President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. A computer scientist by training, she cofounded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing with Anita Borg in 1994 and joined the Anita Borg Institute in 2002.

#570

David A. Hodges

#24204

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

David Albert Hodges was an American electrical engineer, digital telephony pioneer, and professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Hodges was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1983 for innovative contributions to integrated circuit design techniques and their application to data and signal processing.

#571

John Todd

#24206

Overall Influence

1911 - 2007 (96 years)

John Todd was a Northern Irish mathematician most of whose career was spent in England and the USA; he was a pioneer in the field of numerical analysis. He was born in Carnacally, County Down, Ireland, and grew up near Belfast. He attended Methodist College Belfast after winning a scholarship. In his final year at the College he only studied maths as a result of his desire to become an engineer. He received his BSc degree from Queen's University in 1931, and went to St. John's College at Cambridge University, studying for 2 years with J. E. Littlewood, who advised him against getting a doctor...

#572

Russell Greiner

#24293

Overall Influence

Russell Greiner is a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a specialist in machine learning and bioinformatics. Greiner is one of the principal investigators at the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning and has published over 200 refereed papers and patents.

#573

Marius Vassiliou

#24307

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Marius Vassiliou is an American computational scientist, geophysicist, and aerospace executive. He is also an authority on the history of petroleum. Vassiliou is of Greek Cypriot descent and was educated at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology .

#574

David Turnbull

#24317

Overall Influence

1915 - 2007 (92 years)

David Turnbull was an American physical chemist who worked in the interdisciplinary fields of materials science and applied physics. Turnbull made seminal contribution to solidification theory and glass formation. Turnbull was born in Elmira, Elmira Township, Stark County, Illinois. He graduated from high school in 1932 and then received a bachelor's degree in 1936 from Monmouth College , specializing in physical chemistry. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry under Thomas Erwin Phipps from the University of Illinois in 1939. He was on the faculty of Case Institute of Technology fro...

#575

Mason Porter

#24357

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Mason A. Porter is an American mathematician and physicist currently at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

#576

Amos Smith

#24391

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Amos B. Smith III is an American chemist. Biography He is most notable for his research in the total synthesis of complex natural product, as well as the chemistry of mammalian pheromones and chemical communication.

#577

Michael W. Deem

#24426

Overall Influence

Michael W. Deem is an American engineer, scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. Deem received his B.S. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1991 and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994. His thesis research was in statistical mechanics and disordered materials with David Chandler. He did postdoctoral research at Harvard University in physics with David R. Nelson. Deem joined the faculty at University of California, Los Angeles, in 1996 and rose to the rank of associate professor of chemical engineering. From 2002 to 2020 Deem was the John W.

#578

Christopher T. Hill

Christopher T. Hill

#24443

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Christopher T. Hill is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who did undergraduate work in physics at M.I.T. , and graduate work at Caltech . Hill's Ph.D. thesis, "Higgs Scalars and the Nonleptonic Weak Interactions" contains one of the first detailed discussions of the two-Higgs-doublet model and its impact upon weak interactions.

#579

Folke K. Skoog

#24476

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

Folke Karl Skoog was a Swedish-born American plant physiologist who was a pioneer in the field of plant growth regulators, particularly cytokinins. Skoog was a recipient of the National Medal of Science 1991.

#580

Andrea Goldsmith

#24554

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Andrea Goldsmith is an American electrical engineer and the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. She is also the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton. She was previously the Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, as well as a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Her interests are in the design, analysis and fundamental performance limits of wireless systems and networks, and in the application of communication theory and signal processing to neuroscience. She also co-founded and served as chief technology officer of Plume WiFi and Quantenna Communications.

#581

Marco Marra

#24615

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Marco A. Marra is a Distinguished Scientist and Director of Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre and Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia . He also serves as UBC Canada Research Chair in Genome Science for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and is an inductee in the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. Marra has been instrumental in bringing genome science to Canada by demonstrating the pivotal role that genomics can play in human health and disease research.

#582

Kerry Sieh

#24651

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Kerry E. Sieh is an American geologist and seismologist. Sieh's principal research interest is earthquake geology, which uses geological layers and landforms to understand the geometries of active faults, the earthquakes they generate, and the crustal structure their movements produce. His early work on the San Andreas fault led to the discovery of how often and how regularly it produces large earthquakes in southern California.

#583

Howard A. Stone

Howard A. Stone

#24652

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Howard Alvin Stone is the Donald R. Dixon '69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. His field of research is in fluid mechanics, chemical engineering and complex fluids. He became an Editor of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics in 2021.

#584

Harry Wiener

#24724

Overall Influence

Harry Wiener was an Austrian-American chemist, physician and psychologist, a pioneer in cheminformatics and chemical graph theory, and a long-time employee at Pfizer. Education and career Wiener was born in Vienna in 1924 to Jewish parents Joseph Wiener and Beile Wiener. His family emigrated to New York City, US, in 1941 by way of France and Portugal. Wiener attended Brooklyn College and received a BS in chemistry in 1945. Wiener attended Long Island College of Medicine and obtained an MD in 1949. Wiener was appointed to the management team at Pfizer in 1958 and remained at the company until ...

#585

Alfred Mueller

#24752

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Alfred H. Mueller is an American theoretical physicist, and the Enrico Fermi Professor of Physics at Columbia University. Mueller studied at Iowa State University, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1961 and in 1965 completed his PhD at MIT. He then served until 1971 as a post-doc at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Since 1972 he has been at Columbia University. He was also a visiting scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study , at the nuclear research centers in Saclay, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, New York University, and at SL...

#586

Harold Garner

#24758

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 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.

#587

Torbjörn Caspersson

#24770

Overall Influence

1910 - 1997 (87 years)

Torbjörn Oskar Caspersson was a Swedish cytologist and geneticist. He was born in Motala and attended the University of Stockholm, where he studied medicine and biophysics. Contributions Caspersson made several key contributions to biology.In the 1934 he and Einar Hammarsten showed that DNA was a polymer. Previous theories suggested that each molecule was only ten nucleotides long.He provided William Astbury with well prepared samples of DNA for Astbury's pioneering structural measurements.In 1936, in his doctoral thesis in chemistry, presented at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he f...

#588

Carl Wunsch

#24795

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Carl Wunsch was the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, until he retired in 2013. He is known for his early work in internal waves and more recently for research into the effects of ocean circulation on climate.

#589

Charalambos D. Aliprantis

Charalambos D. Aliprantis

#24886

Overall Influence

1946 - 2009 (63 years)

Charalambos Dionisios Aliprantis was a Greek-American economist and mathematician who introduced Banach space and Riesz space methods in economic theory. He was born in Cefalonia, Greece in 1946 and immigrated to the US in 1969, where he obtained his PhD in Mathematics from Caltech in June 1973.

#590

David Robert Nelson

David Robert Nelson

#24903

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

David R. Nelson is an American physicist, and Arthur K. Solomon Professor of Biophysics, at Harvard University. Education and research David R. Nelson is currently the Arthur K. Solomon Professor of Biophysics and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. He graduated from Cornell University Summa cum laude with a double major in physics and mathematics in 1972, and received an M.S. in theoretical physics in 1974, and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in January, 1975. He was in the fourth and final class of Cornell's short-lived "Six-year Ph.D. program". He then became a ...

#591

Teruko Ishizaka

#25086

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Teruko "Terry" Ishizaka was a Japanese scientist and immunologist who along with her husband Kimishige Ishizaka discovered the antibody class Immunoglobulin E in 1966. Their work was regarded as a major breakthrough in the understanding of allergy, and for this work she received the 1972 Passano Award and the 1973 Gairdner Foundation International Award. She was known in the science world for her generosity and collaborative spirit.

#592

Michelle Effros

#25119

Overall Influence

Michelle Effros is the George Van Osdol Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She has made significant contributions to data compression. Early life and education Effros earned her bachelor's degree at Stanford University in 1989. She was awarded the Stanford University Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award for excellence in engineering. She remained there for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1990 and a PhD in 1994. She worked under the supervision of Robert M. Gray. She spent 1988 and 1989 at Hughes Aircraft Company, studying modulation schemes and future space technology.

#593

David Hogness

#25173

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

David Swenson Hogness was an American biochemist, geneticist, and developmental biologist and emeritus professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. Life Hogness spent most of his youth in Chicago, the son of Thorfin R. Hogness and Phoebe S. Hogness. His parents were both children of immigrants and graduates of the University of Minnesota; his father later received a PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, taught at Berkeley, and in 1930 joined the faculty at the University of Chicago.

#594

Elihu Abrahams

#25180

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Elihu Abrahams was a theoretical physicist, specializing in condensed matter physics. Abrahams attended Brooklyn Technical High School, graduating in 1944. In 1947 Abrahams received his bachelor's degree and in 1952 his PhD, with Charles Kittel as thesis advisor, from the University of California, Berkeley with thesis Spin-lattice relaxation in ferromagnetics. In 1952–1953 he was a research associate in physics at UC Berkeley. He was in 1953–1955 a research associate and in 1955–1956 an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 1956 he became an assistant profess...

#595

Michael H. Hart

#25224

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Michael H. Hart is an American astrophysicist, author, researcher, and white separatist/white nationalist. Since 1978, he has published five books, most notably of the best-selling work, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History.

#596

Anirvan Ghosh

#25327

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Anirvan Ghosh is an American neuroscientist and Biotech executive. Ghosh is a professional in the fields of Neuroscience and Biotechnology. Prior to his current role as CEO of Unity Biotechnology, he held senior positions at several renowned institutions and companies. Ghosh served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and as Chair of Neurobiology at UCSD, where he made significant contributions in the field of Neuroscience. From 2011 to 2016, he served as the Global Head of Neuroscience Discovery at F. Hoffmann-La Roche. Ghosh was founding CSO of E-Scape Bio from 2016 to 2017 and served as the Head of Research and Early Development at Biogen from 2017 to 2020.

#597

Richard Shoup

#25359

Overall Influence

1943 - 2015 (72 years)

Richard Shoup was an American computer scientist and entrepreneur, mainly known from his pioneering work on computer graphics and animation. Originally from Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, he last resided in San Jose, California.

#598

Rick Durrett

#25395

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Richard Timothy Durrett is an American mathematician known for his research and books on mathematical probability theory, stochastic processes and their application to mathematical ecology and population genetics.

#599

Konrad Rudnicki

Konrad Rudnicki

#25520

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Konrad Rudnicki was a Polish astronomer, professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and a priest of the Old Catholic Mariavite Church. He was a member of the Free European Academy of Science, of Commission 28 of the International Astronomical Union, and of the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum in Switzerland.

#600

James A. Ibers

#25559

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

James A. Ibers was the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry before becoming an emeritus professor of chemistry at Northwestern University upon retirement. He is recognized for contributions to inorganic chemistry, especially in the areas of coordination chemistry, bio-inorganic chemistry, solid state synthesis and X-ray crystallography. Ibers passed on December 14, 2021 at the age of 91.

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