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.

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List of the most influential people

#3501

James Lewin McGregor

1921 - 1988 (67 years)

James Lewin McGregor was a mathematician who introduced Karlin–McGregor polynomials. A native of Canada he served in the Canadian military during World War II. He received his undergrad degree from the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD from Cal Tech and then became a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

#3502

Leigh Page

1884 - 1952 (68 years)

Leigh Page was an American theoretical physicist. Chairman of Mathematical Physics at the Sloane Physics Laboratory of Yale University for over three decades, he is the namesake of Yale's Leigh Page Prize Lectures.

#3503

Robert Elderfield

Robert Elderfield

1904 - 1979 (75 years)

Robert Cooley Elderfield was an American chemist. He was born in Niagara Falls, New York, United States. He studied at the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, later at the University of Michigan receiving his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1930. He worked at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research from 1930 till 1936 when he changed to Columbia University. He was moved to University of Michigan in 1952.

#3504

Frank Wattendorf

1906 - 1986 (80 years)

Frank Wattendorf was an American physicist specializing in wind tunnels for research in aerodynamics. Wattendorf is recalled for his report on the wind tunnel at Ötztal that was under construction in Austria during World War II. Wattendorf's report, and one by Theodore von Kármán, spurred on renewed research in aerodynamics.

#3505

John Adelbert Parkhurst

John Adelbert Parkhurst

1861 - 1925 (64 years)

John Adelbert Parkhurst was an American astronomer. He was born in Dixon, Illinois, and attended the public schools in Marengo, IL and Wheaton College. He then attended Rose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, earning a B.Sc. in 1886. For the following two years he taught mathematics at the same school. He was the son of Sanford Britton Parkhurst and Jane Clarissa Hubbard. Source: George Parkhurst Increasings by Peter G. Parkhurst, p. 402. In 1888 he married Anna Greenleaf.

#3506

Maurice Anthony Biot

1905 - 1985 (80 years)

Maurice Anthony Biot was a Belgian-American applied physicist. He made contributions in thermodynamics, aeronautics, geophysics, earthquake engineering, and electromagnetism. Particularly, he was accredited as the founder of the theory of poroelasticity.

#3507

Paul Hugh Emmett

Paul Hugh Emmett

1900 - 1985 (85 years)

Paul Hugh Emmett was an American chemist best known for his pioneering work in the field of catalysis and for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He spearheaded the research to separate isotopes of uranium and to develop a corrosive uranium gas. Emmett also made significant contributions to BET Theory which explains the relationship between surface area and gas adsorption. He served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University for 23 years throughout his scientific career.

#3508

Rudolph John Anderson

1879 - 1961 (82 years)

Rudolph John Anderson was an American biochemist and a United States Army officer. Biography Early life Rudolph Anderson was born in 1879 in Haina, Sweden. At the age of 13, he moved to Boston where he attended an English grammar school from which he graduated by the time he turned 17. Deciding that continuing his education in High School was pointless for him, he started working on various industrial jobs during the day while studying during the night. That continued for several years, until, at one of the rubber manufacturing companies, he got a job as a laboratory boy and assistant to a c...

#3509

Sydney Goldstein

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

Sydney Goldstein FRS was a British mathematician noted for his contribution to fluid dynamics. He is described as: "... one of those who most influenced progress in fluid dynamics during the 20th century."

#3510

Ernest A. Batchelder

1875 - 1957 (82 years)

Ernest Allan Batchelder was an American artist and educator who made Southern California his home in the early 20th century. He created art tiles and was a leader in the American Arts and Crafts Movement.

#3511

Norman Percy Allen

1903 - 1972 (69 years)

Norman Percy Allen was a British metallurgist. Early life He was born in Wrexham, North Wales, the son of accountant Sidney Edward Allen and educated at Burton-on-Trent Boys' Grammar School and Sheffield University, where he obtained an honours degree in metallurgy.

#3512

Frank Curry Mathers

1881 - 1973 (92 years)

Frank Curry Mathers , was an American physical chemist and university professor. He was president of the Electrochemical Society. Early life and education Mathers, son of Elizabeth Bonsall and John Thomas Mathers, was born in a one-room log cabin in Monroe County, Indiana, four miles south of Bloomington. He graduated from Bloomington High School in 1899. Mathers received the A.B. degree in chemistry from Indiana University in 1903. He joined the I.U. faculty as instructor of chemistry, while also doing graduate work in electroplating with Oliver W. Brown for the M.A. degree in 1905. Mathers was granted a leave of absence to work toward his 1907 Ph.D.

#3513

Haroutioun Hovanes Chakmakjian

1878 - 1973 (95 years)

Haroutioun Hovanes Chakmakjian was a published scientist, as well as the father of American composer Alan Hovhaness. A professor of chemistry at Tufts University, Chakmakjian wrote numerous books in several languages. His notable publications included an English-Armenian dictionary which is believed to be the first of its kind in the modern Armenian language. The dictionary has become an enduring work of Armenian lexicography and remains regularly used today. His other publications included a 700-page history of Armenia.

#3514

Bernard Lippmann

1914 - 1988 (74 years)

Bernard Abram Lippmann. was an American theoretical physicist. A former Professor of Physics at New York University, Lippmann is mainly known for the Lippmann-Schwinger equation, a widely used tool in non-relativistic scattering theory, which he formulated together with his doctoral supervisor Julian Schwinger

#3515

Winslow Upton

1853 - 1914 (61 years)

Winslow Upton was an American astronomer. He published extensively on the subject of meteorology. Biography He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and was valedictorian when he graduated in 1875. Upton then worked as an assistant at Mitchel Observatory of the University of Cincinnati where he received his master's degree in 1877. He later received an honorary doctorate from Brown in 1906.

#3516

Francisco Zaera

Francisco Zaera is a Venezuelan-American chemist, currently a distinguished professor at University of California, Riverside and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society and the American Vacuum Society.

#3517

Lauder William Jones

1869 - 1960 (91 years)

Lauder William Jones was an American chemist, born at New Richmond, Ohio. He was graduated at Williams College in 1892, and received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1897. In the same year, he became an assistant in chemistry at Chicago, where he remained until 1907. From 1907 to 1918, he was professor of chemistry at the University of Cincinnati, and from 1918 to 1920, he was dean of the school of chemistry at the University of Minnesota, after which he accepted a call to the chair of chemistry at Princeton. He devoted his attention chiefly to organic chemistry and published...

#3518

Jakob Kunz

1874 - 1938 (64 years)

Jakob Kunz was an American physicist who pioneered the development and application of photoelectric cells. Born in Brittnau, Switzerland, he earned his bachelor's degree in 1897 and his Ph.D in 1902 from the Eidgenossisches Polytechnikum in Zurich, and was active in the Baháʼí Faith from 1921.

#3519

Joseph P. LaSalle

1916 - 1983 (67 years)

Joseph Pierre LaSalle was an American mathematician specialising in dynamical systems and responsible for important contributions to stability theory, such as LaSalle's invariance principle which bears his name.

#3520

Charles Christian Lauritsen

Charles Christian Lauritsen

1892 - 1968 (76 years)

Charles Christian Lauritsen was a Danish/American physicist. Early life and career Lauritsen was born in Holstebro, Denmark and studied architecture at the Odense Tekniske Skole, graduating in 1911. In 1916 he emigrated to the United States with his wife Sigrid Henriksen and son Tommy, first to Florida, where the family lived for a time on a houseboat, and later to Boston, where he worked as a draftsman during the Great War and was a witness to the Boston Molasses Disaster. By 1921 he was working in Palo Alto on radio for communicating between ship and shore. He became interested in the desig...

#3521

Harold Masursky

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Harold Masursky was an American astrogeologist. After leaving Yale University without defending his dissertation, he started his career in the early 1950s as a field geologist in Wyoming and Colorado working for the United States Geological Survey . In the early 1960s, he moved to the Astrogeology division of the USGS and began working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the mid-1960s, he moved to Flagstaff, Arizona as a founding planetary geologist at the newly constructed USGS Astrogeology Science Center. Throughout his professional career with the USGS, his wo...

#3522

Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

1918 - 1988 (70 years)

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.

#3523

Joseph Wickham Roe

1871 - 1960 (89 years)

Joseph Wickham Roe was an American engineer and Professor of Industrial Engineering at the New York University, known for his seminal work on machine tools and machine tool builders history. Biography Roe was born in 1871 as youngest child of Alfred Cox, pastor of a Presbyterian church and educator, and Emma Wickham Roe. After attending the Burr and Burton Academy, he graduated in 1895 at the Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, and after years of practice received his Master of Engineering in 1907.

#3524

George Beadle

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

George Wells Beadle was an American geneticist. In 1958 he shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward Tatum for their discovery of the role of genes in regulating biochemical events within cells. He also served as the 7th President of the University of Chicago.

#3525

Leon Pape

1925 - 1984 (59 years)

Leon Pape was a medical physicist who received his BSc, MSc and PhD in Physics from the University of Southern California. He became certified in radiological physics by the American Board of Radiology and from 1955 to 1962 he worked as a radiological physicist at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. He served at the California State University Los Angeles as radiation safety officer and as professor of physics until 1971, and worked on the development of studies in biophysics, radiological health physics, and electron microscopy. He was elevated to departmental head of physics a...

#3526

Augustus William Smith

Augustus William Smith

1802 - 1866 (64 years)

Augustus William Smith was an American educator, astronomer and mathematician in the mid-19th century. Smith was born in Newport, Herkimer County, New York, May 12, 1802. He attended Hamilton College, and graduated in 1825. After college, he began teaching in the Methodist Oneida conference seminary, in Cazenovia, New York. He became head of Oneida in 1827, the same year in which he married his wife, Catherine R. Childs. While at Oneida, he earned a master's degree from Hamilton.

#3527

Henry A. Bumstead

1870 - 1920 (50 years)

Henry Andrews Bumstead was an American physicist who taught at Yale from 1897 to 1920. In 1918 he was scientific attache to the United States embassy in London. In 1920 he was Chairman of the National Research Council.

#3528

Horace M. Trent

1907 - 1964 (57 years)

Horace Maynard Trent was an American physicist best known for being part of the team that found that the crack of a bullwhip was actually a sonic boom. He is also the author of the currently accepted force-current analogy in physics known as the Trent analogy.

#3529

Francis Bitter

1902 - 1967 (65 years)

Francis Bitter was an American physicist. Bitter invented the Bitter plate used in resistive magnets . He also developed the water cooling method inherent to the design of Bitter magnets. Prior to this development, there was no way to cool electromagnets, limiting their maximum flux density.

#3530

Edward M. Hartwell

Edward M. Hartwell

1850 - 1922 (72 years)

Edward Mussey Hartwell was an American academic who taught at Johns Hopkins University. Biography He was born in Exeter, New Hampshire to parents Josiah Shattuck Hartwell and Catherine Stone Hartwell on May 29, 1850, as the eldest of eight children. Edward M. Hartwell attended Lawrence Academy and the Groton School, before graduating from the Boston Latin School, after which he enrolled at Amherst College. Hartwell received his bachelor's degree in 1873, and became vice principal at a school in New Jersey before taking a position at the Boston Latin School. He left Boston to pursue medical st...

#3531

Margaretta Palmer

1862 - 1924 (62 years)

Margaretta Palmer was an American astronomer, one of the first women to earn a doctorate in astronomy. She worked at the Yale University Observatory at a time when woman were frequently hired as assistant astronomers, but when most of these women had only a high school education, so Palmer's advanced degree made her unusual for her time.

#3532

William Smythe

1893 - 1988 (95 years)

William Ralph Smythe was a physicist at California Institute of Technology. Early life A native of Canon City, Colorado, he graduated from Colorado College and spent some time in Dartmouth College before his studies were interrupted by World War I. He eventually completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1921 under Nobel laureate Albert Michelson and Henry Gale.

#3533

Ira Sprague Bowen

1898 - 1973 (75 years)

Ira Sprague Bowen was an American physicist and astronomer. In 1927 he discovered that nebulium was not really a chemical element but instead doubly ionized oxygen. Life and work Bowen was born in Seneca Falls, New York in 1898 to Philinda Sprague and James Bowen. Due to frequent moves of his family he was home schooled until his father died in 1908. From that point on he attended Houghton College where his mother worked as teacher. After graduation from high school in 1915 Bowen stayed at the junior college of Houghton College, and later joined Oberlin College from which he graduated in 1919.

#3534

Jacob Joseph Taubenhaus

1884 - 1937 (53 years)

Jacob Joseph Taubenhaus born in Safed, Palestine on October 20, 1884, was Chief of the Division of Plant Pathology and Physiology of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas from 1916 until his death on December 13, 1937. During his life, he was also a leader in Jewish affairs at the university and was a founder of Texas A&M Hillel.

#3535

Paul-Antoine Giguère

1910 - 1987 (77 years)

Paul-Antoine Giguère, was a Canadian academic and chemist. Born in Quebec City, he received a Bachelor of Science degree from Université Laval in 1934, and a doctorate from McGill University in 1937 under the direction of Otto Maass. He started working in the laboratory of CIL in Beloeil, Quebec and then went to work at the California Institute of Technology with Linus Pauling.

#3536

Henry William Menard

Henry William Menard

1920 - 1986 (66 years)

Henry William Menard was an American geologist. Life and career He earned a B.S. and M.S. from the California Institute of Technology in 1942 and 1947, having served in the South Pacific during World War II as a photo interpreter. In 1949, he completed a Ph.D. in marine geology at Harvard University. Menard is perhaps best known for his promotion of the theory of plate tectonics before it was widely accepted in the scientific community. Menard served many roles during his career as a marine geologist. Field worker, theorist, educator, popularizer, entrepreneur and statesman.

#3537

Jens Rud Nielsen

1894 - 1979 (85 years)

Jens Rud Nielsen was born in Copenhagen and was an esteemed physicist at the University of Oklahoma. He immigrated to the United States in 1922. He was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931.

#3538

Paul McNally

1890 - 1955 (65 years)

Paul A. McNally was an American astronomer, scientist, and Jesuit priest. He was also a Dean of the Georgetown University School of Medicine. Early life McNally was born on October 14, 1890, in Philadelphia. He entered to the Society of Jesus on August 12, 1908, and graduated from Woodstock College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1915 and a Master of Arts degree in 1917. From 1916 to 1920, McNally was a professor of mathematics at Boston College. In 1916, McNally and BC student Paul Gately revived the Boston College Eagles men's basketball team. McNally served as volunteer coach during the 1916–17 season, winning two of the team's five games.

#3539

Gustaf Wilhelm Hammar

1893 - 1954 (61 years)

Gustaf Wilhelm Hammar was a Swedish-born American experimental physicist. He was the eldest of six children of Anders Vilhelm Hammar and Elin Christina Hammar . He emigrated to the United States in 1913, attended Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and by 1920 was married and living with his wife, Louise , in King County, Washington.

#3540

Samuel Alfred Mitchell

Samuel Alfred Mitchell

1874 - 1960 (86 years)

Samuel Alfred Mitchell was a Canadian-American astronomer who studied solar eclipses and set up a program to use photographic techniques to determine the distance to stars at McCormick Observatory, where he served as the director.

#3541

Calvin Adam Buehler

Calvin Adam Buehler

1896 - 1988 (92 years)

Calvin Adam Buehler was an American organic chemist and professor at the University of Tennessee from 1922 to 1965. He served as the Chemistry Department Head from 1940-1962, during which time he established the first chemistry doctoral program at the University of Tennessee. The chemistry building at the University of Tennessee is named Buehler Hall in his honor.

#3542

Richard C. Lord

1910 - 1989 (79 years)

Richard C. Lord was an American chemist best known for his work in the field of spectroscopy. Academic career Richard Collins Lord was born in Louisville, Kentucky on October 10, 1910. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1936. He spent two years, from 1936 to 1938, as a Fellow of the United States National Research Council, first at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

#3543

Henry Gale

1874 - 1942 (68 years)

Henry Gordon Gale was an American astrophysicist and author. Biography He was born in Aurora, Illinois to Adalaide Rhoda and Eli Holbrook Gale, a physician. His mother died a few weeks after his birth; thereafter he was raised by his maternal grandparents.

#3544

Jesse Francis McClendon

1880 - 1976 (96 years)

Jesse Francis McClendon was an American chemist, zoologist, and physiologist known for the first pH measurement of human stomach in situ. McClendon made substantial contributions in a variety of fields, including invertebrate zoology, nutrition, life processes of cell membranes, the importance of pH control, the role of iodine in human health, and specifically its relation to prevention of goiters.

#3545

Comfort A. Adams

Comfort A. Adams

1868 - 1958 (90 years)

Comfort Avery Adams was an American electrical engineer who as a student helped Albert A. Michelson with the Michelson–Morley experiment , which was later viewed as confirming the special relativity theory of Albert Einstein . He was a recipient of the IEEE Edison Medal and AIEE Lamme Medal.

#3546

Herschel Clifford Parker

Herschel Clifford Parker

1867 - 1944 (77 years)

Herschel Clifford Parker was a United States physicist and mountaineer. Biography He graduated from the Columbia School of Mines in 1890, receiving a degree of Ph.B., and was connected with the faculty there in 1891–1911, filling the chair of physics for some time before his resignation. He wrote Systematic Treatise on Electrical Measurements , and made many contributions to scientific periodicals. He was a member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the American Physical Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, The Explorers Club, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. He was a ...

#3547

David Wilkinson

David Wilkinson

1771 - 1852 (81 years)

David Wilkinson was a U.S. mechanical engineer who invented a lathe for cutting screw threads, which was extremely important in the development of the machine tool industry in the early 19th century.

#3548

William V. Houston

William V. Houston

1900 - 1968 (68 years)

William Vermillion Houston was an American physicist who made contributions to spectroscopy, quantum mechanics, and solid-state physics as well as being a teacher and administrator. He became the second president of Rice University in 1946.

#3549

David Lester

1916 - 1990 (74 years)

David Lester was an American biochemist who did extensive studies of alcoholism and was a professor at Rutgers University. Life and career He was scientific director of the Center of Alcohol Studies after it moved to Rutgers in 1962. From 1940 to 1980, he was an editorial board member of the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol , based at the Center for Alcohol Studies.

#3550

Bergen Davis

1869 - 1958 (89 years)

Bergen Davis was an American physicist and a professor at Columbia University. Davis was born March 31, 1869, near Whitehouse, New Jersey, son of John Davis, a farmer, and Katherine Dilts Davis. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1896 and was awarded a master's degree by Columbia University in 1900 and a Ph.D. in 1901, after which he studied in Europe for two years on a John Tyndall Fellowship under J. J. Thomson and others.

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