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

#651

Paul L. Schechter

Paul L. Schechter

#28100

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Paul L. Schechter is an American astronomer and observational cosmologist. He is the William A. M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics, Emeritus, at MIT. Schechter received his bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1968, and his Ph.D. degree from Caltech in 1975. He held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Arizona, then went to Harvard as an assistant professor. He moved to his present position at MIT in 1988. Schechter was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2003.

#652

Basil Gordon

#28120

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

Basil Gordon was a mathematician at UCLA, specializing in number theory and combinatorics. He obtained his Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Tom Apostol. Ken Ono was one of his students.

#653

David B. Kaplan

#28126

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

David B. Kaplan is an American physicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of Washington, where he was director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory during the period 2006–2016 and is now a senior fellow.

#654

Huimin Zhao

#28181

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Huimin Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as well as the leader of the Biosystems Design research theme in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. His research focuses on directed evolution, metabolic engineering, bioinformatics and high throughput technologies.

#655

Katya Echazarreta

#28205

Overall Influence

1995 - Present (30 years)

Katya Celeste Echazarreta González is a Mexican electrical engineer, science communicator, and Citizen Astronaut. She worked at NASA, first as an intern during her university undergraduate career, then later as a test lead for the Europa Clipper Ground Support Equipment group. She has contributed to a total of five NASA missions. Around 2019, Echazarreta began uploading engineering-related content to Instagram, later expanding her platforms to YouTube and TikTok.

#656

Peter Dervan

#28226

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Peter B. Dervan is the Bren Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. The primary focus of his research is the development and study of small organic molecules that can sequence-specifically recognize DNA, a field in which he is an internationally recognized authority. The most important of these small molecules are pyrrole–imidazole polyamides. Dervan is credited with influencing "the course of research in organic chemistry through his studies at the interface of chemistry and biology" as a result of his work on "the chemical principles involved in sequence-specific recognition of double helical DNA".

#657

Jean-Luc Margot

#28261

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Jean-Luc Margot is a Belgian-born astronomer and a UCLA professor with expertise in planetary sciences and SETI. Career Margot has discovered and studied several binary asteroids with radar and optical telescopes. His discoveries include Sylvia I Romulus, Kalliope I Linus, S/2003 1, Alauda I Pichi üñëm, and the binary nature of Hermes.

#658

Paul Bechly

#28293

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Paul Lorin Bechly is an American chemical engineer known for his work in the development of an environmentally-oriented perfluorocarbon gas policy for DuPont and other industries. He currently works in the financial industry.

#659

Julius Adler

#28309

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (95 years)

Julius Adler is an American biochemist. He has been an Emeritus Professor of biochemistry and genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 1997. Early life Adler was born in Edelfingen, Germany in 1930. He came to the United States in 1938 at the age of 8 and became a naturalized citizen in 1943. His family settled in Grand Forks, North Dakota where their relatives were among the first Europeans to arrive in 1880. Since he was child, Adler had been fascinated by how organisms sense and respond to the environment.

#660

Leonard Mlodinow

Leonard Mlodinow

#28316

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Leonard Mlodinow is an American theoretical physicist and mathematician, screenwriter and author. In physics, he is known for his work on the large N expansion, a method of approximating the spectrum of atoms based on the consideration of an infinite-dimensional version of the problem, and for his work on the quantum theory of light inside dielectrics.

#661

Henry Lipson

#28416

Overall Influence

1910 - 1991 (81 years)

Henry Lipson CBE FRS was a British physicist. He was Professor of Physics, Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, 1954–77, then professor emeritus. Background Lipson was born in Liverpool, England, into a family of Polish Jewish immigrants. His father was a steelworker at the Shotton works in Flintshire. His mother was very insistent about the importance of education and ensured that he attended Hawarden Grammar School where he won a scholarship and exhibition to study physics at Liverpool University. He graduated with First Class Honours in 1930 and stayed on to do research at Liv...

#662

Milton Dean Slaughter

Milton Dean Slaughter

#28428

Overall Influence

Milton Dean Slaughter is an American theoretical and phenomenological physicist and affiliate professor of physics at Florida International University. Slaughter was a visiting associate professor of physics in the Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Maryland, College Park while on sabbatical from Los Alamos National Laboratory of the University of California from 1984 to 1985. He is also chair emeritus and university research professor of physics emeritus at the University of New Orleans . Prior to joining UNO as chair of the physics department: He was a postdoctoral fellow in the ...

#663

Carl W. Helstrom

#28488

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Carl W. Helstrom was one of the earliest pioneers in the field of quantum information theory. He is well known in this field for discovering what is now known as the Helstrom measurement, the quantum measurement with minimum error probability for distinguishing one quantum state from another. He has written a textbook which has been widely read by experts in quantum information theory. He authored several other textbooks on signal detection and estimation theory.

#664

Peter A. Carruthers

#28594

Overall Influence

1935 - 1997 (62 years)

Peter Carruthers was an American physicist best known for leading the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1973 until 1980. Early life and education Peter Carruthers was born in Lafayette, Indiana, United States. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology graduating in 1957. He then studied at Cornell University where in 1961 he gained a PhD in theoretical physics. His doctoral advisor was Hans Bethe.

#665

Frank B. Salisbury

#28634

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Frank Boyer Salisbury was an American plant physiologist who served for a time as head of the Utah State University department of plant science. Career Salisbury held a B.S. and M.A. from the University of Utah. He received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He taught for eleven years as a professor at Colorado State University before joining the faculty of USU.

#666

Bill Pickering

#28645

Overall Influence

1910 - 2004 (94 years)

William Hayward Pickering was a New Zealand-born aerospace engineer who headed Pasadena, California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 22 years, retiring in 1976. He was a senior NASA luminary and pioneered the exploration of space. Pickering was also a founding member of the United States National Academy of Engineering.

#667

Keith Stroyan

#28762

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Keith D. Stroyan is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Iowa. His main research interests are in analysis and visual depth perception. Publications Stroyan, K. D.; Luxemburg, W. A. J. Introduction to the theory of infinitesimals. Pure and Applied Mathematics, No. 72. Academic Press [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers], New York-London, 1976.Reviewer Frank Wattenberg for Math Reviews wrote that "mathematicians whose principal interest is in functional analysis, complex analysis, or topology will find here some very valuable contributions to our understanding of these subjects" here.The book was cited over 365 times at Google Scholar in 2011.Stroyan, K.

#668

Henry Tye

#28774

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Sze-Hoi Henry Tye is a Chinese-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist most notable for proposing that relative brane motion could cause cosmic inflation as well as his work on superstring theory, brane cosmology and elementary particle physics. He had his primary and secondary school education in Hong Kong. Graduated from La Salle College. He received his B.S. from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Francis Low. He is the Horace White Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Cornell University and a fellow of the American Physical Society.

#669

George Feher

#28838

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

George Feher was an American biophysicist working at the University of California San Diego. Birth and education George Feher was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1924. Fehér is a hungarian name and his birth town was ceeded from Hungary 4 years before his birth. So Fehér was a hungarian jew.

#670

Avishai Dekel

#28885

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Avishai Dekel is a professor of physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, holding the Andre Aisenstadt Chair of Theoretical Physics. His primary research interests are in astrophysics and cosmology.

#671

Arthur Rubin

#28937

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Arthur Leonard Rubin is an American mathematician and aerospace engineer. He was named a Putnam Fellow on four consecutive occasions from 1970 to 1973. Life and career Rubin's mother was Jean E. Rubin, a professor of mathematics at Purdue University, and his father was Herman Rubin, a professor of statistics at the same university. Arthur co-authored his first paper with his mother in 1969 at the age of 13. He earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1978, under the direction of Alexander S. Kechris.

#672

William Pearson

#29030

Overall Influence

William Raymond Pearson is professor of biochemistry and molecular Genetics in the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia. Pearson is best known for the development of the FASTA format. Education Pearson graduated with a BS in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in 1977 from Caltech. As a graduate student, he published several papers describing computer programs for analyzing biological data.

#673

Alexander J. Dessler

#29057

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (97 years)

Alexander J. Dessler was an American space scientist known for conceiving the term heliosphere and for founding the first Space Science Department in the United States. Early life and education Dessler was born on October 21, 1928, in San Francisco, California, and received a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1952 and a Ph.D. in physics from Duke University in 1956. His PhD thesis was "The amplitude dependence of the velocity of second sound" under William M. Fairbank.

#674

Richard Hynes

#29077

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Richard Olding Hynes is a British biologist, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His research focuses on cell adhesion and the interactions between cells and the extracellular matrix, with a particular interest in understanding molecular mechanisms of cancer metastasis. He is well known as a co-discoverer of fibronectin molecules, a discovery that has been listed by Thomson Scientific ScienceWatch as a Nobel Prize candidate.

#675

Kenneth S. Suslick

Kenneth S. Suslick

#29088

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Kenneth S. Suslick is the Marvin T. Schmidt Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His area of focus is on the chemical and physical effects of ultrasound, sonochemistry, and sonoluminescence. In addition, he has worked in the fields of artificial and machine olfaction, electronic nose technology, chemical sensor arrays, and the use of colorimetric sensor arrays as an optoelectronic nose.

#676

Pablo Parrilo

#29132

Overall Influence

Pablo A. Parrilo from MIT was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for contributions to semidefinite and sum-of-squares optimization. He was named a SIAM Fellow in 2018.

#677

Susan Montgomery

#29216

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

M. Susan Montgomery is a distinguished American mathematician whose current research interests concern noncommutative algebras: in particular, Hopf algebras, their structure and representations, and their actions on other algebras. Her early research was on group actionss on rings.

#678

Donald L. Turcotte

#29237

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Donald Lawson Turcotte is an American geophysicist most noted for his work on the boundary layer theory of mantle convection as part of the theory of plate tectonics. He works at the University of California, Davis.

#679

Bruce Lahn

#29286

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Bruce Lahn is a Chinese-born American geneticist. Lahn came to the U.S. from China to continue his education in the late 1980s. He is the William B. Graham professor of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. He is also the founder of the Center for Stem Cell Biology and Tissue Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Lahn currently serves as the chief scientist of VectorBuilder, Inc.

#680

William R. Sears

#29297

Overall Influence

1913 - 2002 (89 years)

William Rees Sears was an aeronautical engineer and educator who worked at Caltech, Northrop Aircraft, Cornell University , and the University of Arizona. He was an editor of the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences from 1955 to 1963 and the founding Editor of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics in 1969.

#681

Paul W. K. Rothemund

#29345

Overall Influence

Paul Wilhelm Karl Rothemund is a research professor at the Computation and Neural Systems department at Caltech. He has become known in the fields of DNA nanotechnology and synthetic biology for his pioneering work with DNA origami. He shared both categories of the 2006 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology with Erik Winfree for their work in creating DNA nanotubes, algorithmic molecular self-assembly of DNA tile structures, and their theoretical work on DNA computing. Rothemund is also a 2007 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.

#682

Donald Allan Darling

#29388

Overall Influence

1915 - 2014 (99 years)

Donald Allan Darling was an American statistician, known for the Anderson–Darling test. Darling was born in 1915 in Los Angeles. In 1934 Darling began his undergraduate study at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1939. In 1940 he became a meteorologist at Pan American Airways and from 1942 to 1946, during World War II, he headed the statistics department of the Air Force Weather Research Project.

#683

Mika Tosca

#29465

Overall Influence

Mika Tosca is a climate scientist and faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research concerns ways in which art and design can impact communication about climate science to more effectively address climate change. Tosca also contributes to science communication, including through science-art initiatives, and she is an advocate for Trans people in STEM, academia, and the media.

#684

Richard Anthony Jefferson

Richard Anthony Jefferson

#29610

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Richard Anthony Jefferson is an American-born molecular biologist and social entrepreneur who developed the widely used reporter gene system GUS, conducted the world's first biotech crop release, proposed the Hologenome theory of evolution, pioneered Biological Open Source and founded The Lens. He is founder of the social enterprise Cambia and a professor of Biological Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology. In 2003 he was named by Scientific American as one of the world's 50 most influential technologists, and is renowned for his work on making science-enabled innovation more widely accessible.

#685

Frank Kreith

#29635

Overall Influence

1922 - 2018 (96 years)

Frank Kreith was an American mechanical engineer. Born in Vienna, Kreith fled Austria after the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938 as a member of the Kindertransport. He obtained degrees from the University of California, Berkeley , the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Paris . Kreith worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, received a fellowship from the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation to study at Princeton University and taught at Berkeley and Lehigh University before becoming a faculty member at University of Colorado Boulder in 1959. He wa...

#686

Danny Calegari

#29657

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Danny Matthew Cornelius Calegari is a mathematician and, , a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago. His research interests include geometry, dynamical systems, low-dimensional topology, and geometric group theory.

#687

Paul A. Libby

#29779

Overall Influence

1921 - 2021 (100 years)

Paul Andrews Libby was a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, San Diego, a specialist in the field of combustion and aerospace engineering. Biography Libby received his bachelor's degree in 1942 and obtained his PhD in 1949, both from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. After his bachelor's degree, he worked at Chance Vought Aircraft for two years and then served in the United States Navy during World War II until 1946 in between his Bachelors and Doctorate degrees; he was a Junior Grade Lieutenant when discharged.

#688

Marc Kamionkowski

#29839

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Marc Kamionkowski is an American theoretical physicist and currently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include particle physics, dark matter, inflation, the cosmic microwave background and gravitational wavess.

#689

Christian Keysers

Christian Keysers

#29846

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Christian Keysers is a French and German neuroscientist. Education and career He finished his school education at the European School, Munich and studied psychology and biology at the University of Konstanz, the Ruhr University Bochum, University of Massachusetts Boston, the Shepens eye research Institute of the Harvard Medical School as well as with Marvin Minsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then started his research career at the University of St Andrews by investigating cells in the temporal cortex with David Perrett, and described cells that respond when the monkey views particular faces in a way that correlates with conscious perception.

#690

Arthur Wahl

#29855

Overall Influence

1917 - 2006 (89 years)

Arthur Charles Wahl was an American chemist who, as a doctoral student of Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley, first isolated plutonium in February 1941. He was a worker on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos until 1946, when he joined Washington University in St. Louis. Beginning in 1952, he was the Henry V. Farr Professor of Radiochemistry; he received the American Chemical Society Award in Nuclear Chemistry in 1966 and retired in 1983. He moved back to Los Alamos in 1991 and continued his scientific writing until 2005. He died in 2006 of Parkinson's disease and pneum...

#691

Simon Ostrach

#29864

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Simon Ostrach was an American academic and a pioneer in the fields of buoyancy-driven flows and microgravity science. Early life and education Ostrach was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He earned a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Engineering from Rhode Island State College, followed by an additional Master of Science and a PhD from Brown University, both in Applied Mathematics.

#692

Jens Eisert

#29871

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Jens Eisert is a German physicist, ERC fellow, and professor at the Free University of Berlin. He is also affiliated with the Helmholtz Association and the Fraunhofer Society. Scientific work He is known for his research in quantum information science and quantum many-body theory in condensed matter physics. He has made significant contributions to entanglement theory and the study of quantum computing, as well as to the development of protocols in the quantum technologies and to the study of complex quantum systems. Work on compressed sensing quantum state tomography he has contributed to ha...

#693

Thomas C. Hanks

#29877

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Thomas C. Hanks is an American seismologist. He works for the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. Dr. Hanks is a member of the Seismological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the Geological Society of America, the Peninsula Geological Society at Stanford, and many related geological societies. Dr. Hanks has authored dozens of scholarly papers in strong-motion seismology and tectonic geomorphology.

#694

Owen Witte

#29914

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Owen Witte is an American physician-scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a distinguished professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, founding director of the UCLA Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, and the UC Regents’ David Saxon Presidential Chair in developmental immunology . Witte is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of the President's Cancer Panel . He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2013.

#695

Forman A. Williams

Forman A. Williams

#30106

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Forman Arthur Williams is an American academic in the field of combustion and aerospace engineering who is Emeritus Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego.

#696

Deepak Dhar

#30126

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Deepak Dhar is an Indian theoretical physicist known for his research on statistical physics and stochastic processes. In 2022, he became the first Indian to be awarded the Boltzmann Medal, the highest recognition in statistical physics awarded once every three years by IUPAP, for exceptional contributions to the subject.

#697

Erick M. Carreira

#30163

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Erick M. Carreira is a Cuban-born American organic chemist and professor at ETH Zürich. He is known for his research group's work in total synthesis projects, particularly asymmetric synthesis of complex natural products. He became the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2021.

#698

Sabri Ergun

#30172

Overall Influence

1918 - 2006 (88 years)

Sabri Ergun was a Turkish chemical engineer. He is known for the Ergun equation, which expresses the pressure drop across a packed bed. Biography Sabri Ergun was born on 1 March 1918 in Gerede in the Ottoman Empire . He moved to the United States in 1943. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering from Columbia University and a D.Sc. degree from the Vienna University of Technology in 1956. He was married to Dorothy Karns in 1948, and they had three children: David, Robert and James. Ergun served as a staff member of the Coal Research Laboratory at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and was employed by the U.S.

#699

Marvin Chester

#30213

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Marvin Chester was a UCLA emeritus professor of Physics who specialized in quantum mechanics. After receiving his B.S. undergraduate degree from the City College of New York in 1952, he studied under Richard Feynman and John R. Pellam at California Institute of Technology where he received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1961. Thereafter he spent the following 31 years as a faculty member in the Physics department at UCLA.

#700

Howie Choset

#30217

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Howie Choset is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. His research includes snakebots, or robots designed in a segmented fashion to mimic snake-like actuation and motion, demining, and coverage. His snake robots have also been used in surgical applications for diagnosis and tumor removal; nuclear power plant inspection, archaeological excavations, manufacturing applications and understanding biological behaviors of a variety of animals.

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