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

#751

George W. Clark

#32693

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (97 years)

George Whipple Clark was an American astronomer and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When he retired, M.I.T. described him as "a central figure in the development of high-energy astrophysics, particularly in the design, analysis, and interpretation of experiments for the study of high-energy cosmic ray particles and the celestial sources of gamma rays and X-rays."

#752

James Ross MacDonald

#32713

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (102 years)

James Ross Macdonald is an American physicist, who was instrumental in building up the Central Research laboratories of Texas Instruments . Biography He received a B.A. in physics from Williams College and an S.B. and SM in E.E. from MIT in 1944 and 1947. Oxford awarded him a D.Phil. in 1950 and a D.Sc. degree in 1967.

#753

Leon Knopoff

#32758

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Leon Knopoff was an American geophysicist and musicologist. He received his education at Caltech, graduating in 1949 with a PhD in physics, and came to UCLA the following year. He served on the UCLA faculty for 60 years. His research interests spanned a wide variety of fields and included the physics and statistics of earthquakes, earthquake prediction, the interior structure of the Earth, plate tectonics, pattern recognition, non-linear earthquake dynamics and several other areas of solid Earth geophysics. He also made contributions to the fields of musical perception and archaeology.

#754

Yuh Nung Jan

#32781

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Yuh Nung Jan is a Taiwanese-American neuroscientist. He is the Jack and DeLoris Lange Professor of Molecular Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, where he works together with his wife Lily Jan as co-PIs of the Jan Lab.

#755

Marguerite Vogt

Marguerite Vogt

#32804

Overall Influence

1913 - 2007 (94 years)

Marguerite Vogt was a cancer biologist and virologist. She was most noted for her research on polio and cancer at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Early life Vogt was born in Germany in 1913. The youngest daughter of Oskar Vogt and French-born Cécile Vogt-Mugnier, Vogt took her M.D. degree from the University of Berlin in 1937. Her parents were prominent neuroscientists and she grew up in an intense scientific environment. Her older sister, Marthe Vogt was a neuropharmacologist who became a fellow of the Royal Society and a professor at Cambridge.

#756

Nicholas J. Hoff

#32814

Overall Influence

1906 - 1997 (91 years)

Nicholas J. Hoff was a Hungarian-born American engineer specializing in aeronautics and astronautics, which he taught at Stanford University. Biography Hoff spent his adolescence in Budapest, where he went to the same high school that had been attended by Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann. After high school, he enrolled at ETH Zurich, where he studied under Aurel Stodola. He graduated with an engineering degree in 1928.

#757

Peter Montgomery

Peter Montgomery

#32892

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Peter Lawrence Montgomery was an American mathematician who worked at the System Development Corporation and Microsoft Research. He is best known for his contributions to computational number theory and mathematical aspects of cryptography, including the Montgomery multiplication method for arithmetic in finite fields, the use of Montgomery curves in applications of elliptic curves to integer factorization and other problems, and the Montgomery ladder, which is used to protect against side-channel attacks in elliptic curve cryptography.

#758

Takashi Ono

#32965

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (97 years)

Takashi Ono is a retired Japanese-born American mathematician, specializing in number theory and algebraic groups. Early life and education Ono was born in Nishinomiya, Japan. He received his Ph.D. in 1958 at Nagoya University.

#759

Philip R. Goode

#32984

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Philip R. Goode is an American theoretical physicist also working in observational astronomy and its instrumentation. He is a Distinguished Research Professor of Physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology with an H-index > 60. His career divides into five overlapping periods as follows:His earliest work in theoretical nuclear physics, 1967-1982Pioneering research in theoretical helioseismology He created, developed and directed NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research , which made NJIT one of the most important universities in the U.S. for observational solar physics, heliophysics, ...

#760

Paul Green

#32996

Overall Influence

1924 - 2018 (94 years)

Paul Eliot Green, Jr. was an American electrical engineer who researched spread spectrum and radar technology. He was the son of playwright Paul Green. Biography Green was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on January 14, 1924. Green majored in physics at the University of North Carolina. He also served in the Naval ROTC and continued in the Navy Reserve for many years, eventually retiring as a lieutenant commander. He received a master's degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University in 1948. His masters studies focused on cryptographic research, and were followed by Ph.D.

#761

Leroy Chang

#33019

Overall Influence

1936 - 2008 (72 years)

Leroy L. Chang was an experimental physicist and solid state electronics researcher and engineer. Born in China, he studied in Taiwan and then the United States, obtaining his doctorate from Stanford University in 1963. As a research physicist he studied semiconductors for nearly 30 years at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York. This period included pioneering work on superlattice heterostructures with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leo Esaki.

#762

Maksym Radziwill

Maksym Radziwill

#33039

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (37 years)

Maksym Radziwill is a Polish-Canadian mathematician specializing in number theory. He is currently a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. Life He was born in Moscow in 1988. His family moved to Poland in 1991 where he graduated from high school and in 2006 to Canada. Radziwill graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 2009, and in 2013 earned a PhD under Kannan Soundararajan at Stanford University in California. In 2013–2014, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey as a visiting member, and in 2014 became a Hill assistant professor at Rutgers University.

#763

Rebecca Oppenheimer

#33104

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Rebecca Oppenheimer is an American astrophysicist and one of four curator/professors in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Oppenheimer is a comparative exoplanetary scientist. She investigates planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Her optics laboratory is the birthplace of a number of new astronomical instruments designed to tackle the problem of directly seeing and taking spectra of nearby solar systems with exoplanets and studying their composition, with the ultimate goal of finding life outside the solar system.

#764

Kimberly W. Anderson

#33178

Overall Influence

Kimberly W. Anderson is an American chemist. She is the Gill Eminent Professor of Chemical Engineering and Associate Dean for Administration and Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering at the University of Kentucky.

#765

Theodore Y. Wu

#33185

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (101 years)

Theodore Yaotsu Wu is an American engineer. He is a Professor Emeritus of Engineering Science at the California Institute of Technology. His research contribution includes compressible fluid flow, free-streamline theory of cavities, jets and wakes, water waves and free-surface flows, mechanics of fish swimming and bird/insect flight, wind and ocean-current energy, and internal waves in the ocean.

#766

Utpal Banerjee

#33348

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Utpal Banerjee is a distinguished professor of the department of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCLA. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, India and obtained his Master of Science degree in physical chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. In 1984, he obtained a PhD in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology where he was also a postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Seymour Benzer from 1984-1988.

#767

Richard Lee Armstrong

#33361

Overall Influence

1937 - 1991 (54 years)

Richard Lee Armstrong was an American/Canadian scientist who was an expert in the fields of radiogenic isotope geochemistry and geochronology, geochemical evolution of the earth, geology of the American Cordillera, and large-magnitude crustal extension. He published over 170 scientific papers.

#768

Lance E. Davis

#33388

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Lance Edwin Davis was the Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Social Science at the California Institute of Technology. He researched the economic history of financial markets and institutional and technological change. His work has been recognised by The Cliometric Society via their awarding him a Clio Can in recognition his of exceptional support of cliometrics.

#769

Mike Morris

#33417

Overall Influence

Michael S. Morris, is a physics professor at Butler University. He earned a PhD in physics from Caltech under the supervision of Kip Thorne. Among his nine published peer-reviewed papers, his most notable theoretical contribution is his pioneering analysis of time travel through traversable wormholes, coauthored in 1987 with Kip Thorne, and Ulvi Yurtsever. Kip Thorne tells the story of this discovery in his 1995 book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy.

#770

Thomas Hou

#33475

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Thomas Yizhao Hou is the Charles Lee Powell Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work in numerical analysis and mathematical analysis.

#771

Tricia Carmichael

#33620

Overall Influence

Tricia L. Carmichael is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Windsor. She develops new materials for stretchable electronics with a current focus on wearable electronic devices.

#772

Ellen Stofan

#33635

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Ellen Renee Stofan is Under Secretary for Science and Research at The Smithsonian and was previously the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the National Air and Space Museum. As a planetary geologist, Stofan served as Chief Scientist of NASA and as principal advisor to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the agency's science programs, planning and investments. Previously, she was vice president of Proxemy Research in Laytonsville, Maryland, and as an honorary professor in the Earth sciences department at the University College London.

#773

Samuel Epstein

#33636

Overall Influence

1919 - 2001 (82 years)

Samuel Epstein was a Canadian-American geochemist who developed methods for reconstructing geologic temperature records using stable isotope geochemistry. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1977, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1997.

#774

David W. Tank

#33645

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

David W. Tank is an American molecular biologist and neuroscientist who is the Henry L. Hillman Professor in Molecular Biology at Princeton University and the co-director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute along with psychology professor Jonathan Cohen.

#775

Nai-Chang Yeh

#33652

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Nai-Chang Yeh is a Taiwanese-American physicist specializing in experimental condensed matter physics. Early life and education She was born and grew up in Chiayi, Taiwan and received her B. Sc. from National Taiwan University in the capital Taipei City in 1983. She went to the US for graduate education and obtained her Ph.D. in physics in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#776

Robert Bates

#33695

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Robert Hinrichs Bates is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government in the Departments of Government and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. From 2000–2012, he served as Professeur associé, School of Economics, University of Toulouse.

#777

Naomi Leonard

#33701

Overall Influence

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is the director of the Princeton Council on Science and Technology and an associated faculty member in the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and the Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology. She is the founding editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems.

#778

Charles Ofria

#33825

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Dr. Charles A. Ofria is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, the director of the Digital Evolution Lab there, and Director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. He is the son of the late Charles Ofria, who developed the first fully integrated shop management program for the automotive repair industry. Ofria attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Ward Melville High School in 1991. He obtained a B.S. in Computer Science, Pure Mathematics, and Applied Mathematics from Stony Brook University in 1994, and a Ph.D.

#779

Robert J. Schoelkopf

Robert J. Schoelkopf

#33864

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Robert J. Schoelkopf III is an American physicist, most noted for his work on quantum computing as one of the inventors of superconducting qubits. Schoelkopf's main research areas are quantum transport, single-electron devices, and charge dynamics in nanostructures. His research utilizes quantum-effect and single-electron devices, both for fundamental physical studies and for applications. Techniques often include high-speed, high-sensitivity measurements performed on nanostructures at low temperatures. Schoelkopf serves as director of the Yale Center for Microelectronic Materials and Structures and as associate director of the Yale Institute for Nanoscience and Quantum Engineering.

#780

Emily A. Carter

Emily A. Carter

#33935

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Emily Ann Carter is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. She has been on the faculty at Princeton since 2004, including as serving as Princeton's Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2016 to 2019. She moved to UCLA to serve as executive vice chancellor and provost and a distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, before returning to Princeton in December 2021.

#781

Charles Royal Johnson

Charles Royal Johnson

#33947

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Charles Royal Johnson is an American mathematician specializing in linear algebra. He is a Class of 1961 professor of mathematics at College of William and Mary. The books Matrix Analysis and Topics in Matrix Analysis, co-written by him with Roger Horn, are standard texts in advanced linear algebra.

#782

Frank J. Sciulli

#33952

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Frank J. Sciulli is an American experimental physicist, specializing in particle physics. Sciulli studied at the University of Pennsylvania with bachelor's degree in 1960, master's degree in 1961, and PhD in 1965 with a dissertation involving experiments on K-meson decays. At Caltech he was a postdoc. There he became in 1969 an assistant professor and later a professor. In 1981 he became a professor at Columbia University. There he chaired the physics department from 1988 to 1991.

#783

Michael C. Malin

#33982

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Michael C. Malin is an American astronomer, space scientist, and CEO of Malin Space Science Systems. His cameras have been important scientific instruments in the exploration of Mars. Malin designed and ran the orbiting Mars camera which took over 212,000 high-resolution photos of Mars over a nine-year period. In late 2006, he and Kenneth Edgett announced photographic evidence which strongly suggested water was flowing on Mars in the present day.

#784

Gerald Haug

#34016

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Gerald H. Haug is a German geologic climatologist, prize winner of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and since 2007 he has a professorship at the ETH Zürich in Switzerland. In 2015 he became director of the Climate Geochemistry Department and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz and since March 2020, he became the new President of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

#785

Brian Keating

#34061

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Brian Gregory Keating is an American cosmologist. He works on observations of the cosmic microwave background, leading the BICEP, POLARBEAR2 and Simons Array experiments. He received his PhD in 2000, and is a distinguished professor of physics at University of California, San Diego, since 2019. He is the author of two books, Losing The Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.

#786

William Floyd

#34105

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

William J. Floyd is an American mathematician specializing in topology. He is currently a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Floyd received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University 1978 under the direction of William Thurston.

#787

Ed Posner

#34119

Overall Influence

1933 - 1993 (60 years)

Edward Charles "Ed" Posner was an American information theorist and neural network researcher who became chief technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founded the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

#788

Edward Ng

#34122

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Edward W Ng was an American applied mathematician who had also held the positions of senior scientist, senior engineer and technical manager in the U.S. Space Program. He is noted for his broad variety of mathematical applications in space science and engineering. He has also contributed conscientiously in the spin-off of technology from the space program, with applications in such diverse subjects as Bose–Einstein distribution in mathematical physics, symbolic and algebraic computation, computational physics and biomedical research.

#789

Daniel J. Klionsky

#34208

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Daniel Jay Klionsky is an American biochemist and molecular biologist. He is the Alexander G. Ruthven Professor of Life Sciences and professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of Michigan. As a cell biologist, Klionsky pioneered the understanding of autophagy, the process by which cells break down to survive stress conditions such as starvation, and the role autophagy plays in cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and other areas of human health.

#790

Chris Impey

#34240

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Christopher David Impey is a British astronomer, educator, and author. He has been a faculty member at the University of Arizona since 1986. Impey has done research on observational cosmology, in particular low surface brightness galaxies, the intergalactic medium, and surveys of active galaxies and quasars. As an educator, he has pioneered the use of instructional technology for teaching science to undergraduate non-science majors. He has written many technical articles and a series of popular science books including The Living Cosmos, How It Began, How It Ends: From You to the Universe, Dreams of Other Worlds, and Humble Before the Void.

#791

James B. Orlin

#34247

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

James Berger Orlin is an American operations researcher, the Edward Pennell Brooks Professor in Management and Professor of Operations Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Biography Orlin did his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1974. In 1976, he earned two master's degrees, an MSc from California Institute of Technology and an MMath from University of Waterloo. Orlin received his Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1981 under the supervision of Arthur Fales Veinott Jr. He joined the MIT fa...

#792

Walter Haeussermann

Walter Haeussermann

#34265

Overall Influence

1914 - 2010 (96 years)

Walter Haeussermann was a German-American aerospace engineer and member of the "von Braun rocket group", both at Peenemünde and later at Marshall Space Flight Center, where he was the director of the guidance and control laboratory. He was awarded the Department of the Army Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service in 1959 for his contributions to the US rocket program.

#793

Moriba Jah

#34297

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Moriba Kemessia Jah is an American space scientist and aerospace engineer who describes himself as a "space environmentalist", specializing in orbit determination and prediction, especially as related to space situational awareness and space traffic monitoring. He is currently an associate professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. Jah previously worked as a spacecraft navigator at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was a navigator for the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Exploration Rover, and his last mission was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

#794

John Huchra

#34336

Overall Influence

1948 - 2010 (62 years)

John Peter Huchra was an American astronomer and professor. He was the Vice Provost for Research Policy at Harvard University and a Professor of Astronomy at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. He was also a former chair of the United States National Committee for the International Astronomical Union. and past president of the American Astronomical Society.

#795

Timothy M. Swager

Timothy M. Swager

#34358

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Timothy M. Swager is an American Scientist and the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is at the interface of chemistry and materials science, with specific interests in carbon nanomaterials, polymers, and liquid crystals. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors.

#796

Naveen Garg

#34393

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Naveen Garg is a Professor of Computer Science in Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, specializing in algorithms and complexity in theoretical computer science. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, India's highest prize for excellence in science, mathematics and technology, in the mathematical sciences category in the year 2016. Naveen Garg's contributions are primarily in the design and analysis of approximation algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems arising in network design, scheduling, routing, facility location etc.

#797

Guruswami Ravichandran

#34396

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Guruswami Ravichandran is a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. He is also serving as the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech. He served as the director of Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at California Institute of Technology from 2009 to 2015. He was named Fellow of the Society for Experimental Mechanics in 2010 and served as the President of the Society for Experimental Mechanics from 2015 to 2016.

#798

David E. Pritchard

#34406

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

David Edward Pritchard is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , working on atomic physics and educational research. Career Early work Pritchard completed his PhD in 1968 in Harvard University under the supervision of Daniel Kleppner. For his thesis he built the first atomic scattering machine with polarized atoms to study differential spin exchange scattering - the process that excites the 21 cm hydrogen radiation.

#799

Ning Li

#34412

Overall Influence

Ning Li was a Chinese American scientist. In 1983 she emigrated with her family from China to the USA. She is known for her physics and anti-gravity research. In the 1990s, Li worked as a research scientist at the Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research, University of Alabama in Huntsville. In 1999, she left the university to form a company, AC Gravity, LLC, to continue anti-gravity research.

#800

Wally Smith

#34481

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (99 years)

Walter Laws Smith was a British-born American mathematician, known for his contributions to applied probability theory. Biography Smith was born in London on November 12, 1926. Smith received a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University, having gained First Class in the Mathematical Tripos Part 1 and Part 2. He then received an M.A. and Ph.D from Cambridge. His dissertation was entitled Stochastic Sequences of Events advised by Henry Daniels and D. R. Cox, with whom he published the book Queues and also published with in his early years. He became a professor of statistics at The Univ...

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