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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#3801

Alexander A. Nikolsky

1903 - 1963 (60 years)

Alexander Alexandrovitch Nikolsky was a Russian-born American aeronautical engineer who worked in the domain of rotary-wing aircraft. Professor Alexander Alexandrovitch Nikolsky , was born in 1903 in the Russian Empire. He began his career as a cadet in the Russian Imperial Navy. He was serving on a naval training ship in Vladivostok when the Revolution of 1917 overwhelmed Russia. He and his fellow cadets took the ship and sailed it to Japan. He later made his way to Cairo, then to Paris. The White Russian community in Paris took him in hand, and entered him in the Sorbonne, where he received certificates in mathematics and physical mechanics.

#3802

Helen Redfield

1900 - 1988 (88 years)

Helen Redfield , was an American geneticist. Redfield graduated from Rice University in 1920, followed by earning her Ph.D. in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1921. While at Rice, she worked in the mathematics department. She joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1925 and that same year she became a National Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 1926 she married Jack Schultz, the couple had two children. Redfield retained her maiden name upon her marriage. In 1929 she worked as a teaching fellow at New York University. Ten years later she worked as a geneticist in the Kerckhoff Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

#3803

Robert Corey

1897 - 1971 (74 years)

Robert Brainard Corey was an American biochemist, mostly known for his role in discovery of the α-helix and the β-sheet with Linus Pauling. Also working with Pauling was Herman Branson. Their discoveries were remarkably correct, with even the bond lengths being accurate until about 40 years later. The α-helix and β-sheet are two structures that are now known to form the backbones of many proteins.

#3804

Noah Ernest Dorsey

1873 - 1959 (86 years)

Noah Ernest Dorsey was an American physicist, known for his contributions to measurement technology. He was born in Annapolis, Maryland and studied at Johns Hopkins University where he obtained a B.A. and a Ph.D. . He worked at the same place a few years, was with U. S. Bureau of Soils and the Department of Agriculture as well, before he eventually joined National Bureau of Standards where he stayed until retirement in 1943. His research was on standards of radioactivity and x-ray measurements , becoming the leader of the Radium Section and publishing a widely used book covering this emer...

#3805

J. Robert Oppenheimer

J. Robert Oppenheimer

1904 - 1967 (63 years)

J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. He is often called the "father of the atomic bomb". Born in New York City, Oppenheimer earned a bachelor of arts degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1925 and a doctorate in physics from the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1927, where he studied under Max Born. After research at other institutions, he joined the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a full professor in 1936. He made significant c...

#3806

Robert J. Perry

Robert James Perry is an American physicist. Perry earned a degree in liberal arts at St. John's College, Annapolis, and pursued a doctorate in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park. He taught at Ohio State University and was granted emeritus status upon retirement. In 1998, Perry was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, "[f]or the development of renormalization group coupling coherence and the identification of a simple confinement mechanism, which led to a constituent picture in light-front QCD." The American Association for the Advancement of Science granted Pe...

#3807

Harvey C. Rentschler

1880 - 1949 (69 years)

Harvey Clayton Rentschler was an American physicist, inventor, and uranium metallurgist. Rentschler graduated in 1903 with a bachelor's degree from Princeton University and in 1908 with a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University. From 1908 to 1917 he was a professor of physics at the University of Missouri. In 1917 he began work for the Westinghouse Electric Company as a researcher at the Westinghouse Lamp Plant in Bloomfield, New Jersey and continued working there until his retirement in 1945. He became the research director at the Lamp Plant. In 1922 Rentschler, with John W. Marden, d...

#3808

Clarence Cory

1872 - 1937 (65 years)

Clarence Linus Cory was an American engineer and educator who is known as the father of Electrical Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. Early life Cory was born in Lafayette, Indiana, to Thomas Cory and Carrie Stoney. Cory's father was an inventor and served as a topographer in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

#3809

Boris Ephrussi

1901 - 1979 (78 years)

Boris Ephrussi , Professor of Genetics at the University of Paris, was a Russo-French geneticist. Boris was born on 9 May 1901 into a Jewish family. His father, Samuel Osipovich Ephrussi, was a chemical engineer; his grandfather, Joseph Ephrusi , was the founder of a banking dynasty in Kishinev. He published two papers in November 1966 which represented a key step in a decade of research in his laboratory. This research helped transform mammalian, and especially human, genetics.

#3810

Zdeněk Sekera

1905 - 1973 (68 years)

Zdeněk Sekera was a Czech scientist who in 1966 won the American Meteorological Society's Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal for atmospheric science for his research into the dynamics of the atmosphere. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1956 and 1960 in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics. He was professor of meteorology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

#3811

Nellie May Naylor

1885 - 1992 (107 years)

Nellie May Naylor was an American chemist. She was a chemistry professor at Iowa State University , teaching between 1908 until 1955. She was only the second woman to hold this job in the chemistry department.

#3812

Shirley Leon Quimby

1893 - 1986 (93 years)

Shirley Leon Quimby was an American physicist. He graduated from University of California at Berkeley in 1915 and received his PhD in physics at Columbia University in 1925. He served as a professor at Columbia from 1943 and became professor emeritus in 1962. In 1915 he married fellow student Edith Hinkley, who would later be noted for her contributions to nuclear medicine and radiology.

#3813

Herbert H. Chen

1942 - 1987 (45 years)

Herbert Hwa-sen Chen was a theoretical and experimental physicist at the University of California at Irvine known for his contributions in the field of neutrino detection. Chen's work on observations of elastic neutrino-electron scattering provided important experimental support for the electroweak theory of the standard model of particle physics. In 1984 Chen realized that the deuterium of heavy water could be used as a detector that would distinguish the flavors of solar neutrinos. This idea led Chen to develop plans for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory that would eventually make fundam...

#3814

Thomas Lauritsen

1915 - 1973 (58 years)

Thomas Lauritsen was an American nuclear physicist best known for his abilities at designing and building experimental facilities and instrumentation for experimental nuclear physics; and as the longtime co-author of a periodic compilation of nuclear data. Except for brief periods abroad, his career was entirely at the California Institute of Technology, mostly as a professor of physics. In 1969 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and also the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#3815

Arthur Erdélyi

1908 - 1977 (69 years)

Arthur Erdélyi FRS, FRSE was a Hungarian-born British mathematician. Erdélyi was a leading expert on special functions, particularly orthogonal polynomials and hypergeometric functions. Biography He was born Arthur Diamant in Budapest, Hungary to Ignác Josef Armin Diamant and Frederike Roth. His name was changed to Erdélyi when his mother remarried to Paul Erdélyi. He attended the primary and secondary schools there from 1914 to 1926. His interest in mathematics dates back to this time. Erdélyi was a Jew, and so it was difficult for him to receive a university education in his native Hungary. He travelled to Brno, Czechoslovakia, to obtain a degree in electrical engineering.

#3816

Milton W. Humphreys

1844 - 1928 (84 years)

Milton W. Humphreys was an American Confederate sergeant during the American Civil War of 1861-1865 and an early scholar of Ancient Greek and Latin in the United States. He was the first professor to introduce the Roman pronunciation of Latin in the United States while teaching at Washington and Lee University. Additionally, he was the first Professor of Latin and Greek at Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin. He spent the rest of his career at the University of Virginia. He also served as the President of the American Philological Association in 1882–1883.

#3817

Thomas Kilgore Sherwood

1903 - 1976 (73 years)

Thomas Kilgore Sherwood was a noted American chemical engineer and a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. Biography Sherwood was born in Columbus, Ohio, and spent much of his youth in Montreal. In 1923 he received his B.S. from McGill University, and entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his Ph.D. His dissertation, "The Mechanism of the Drying of Solids," was completed in 1929, a year after he had become assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In 1930 he returned to MIT as assistant professor where he remained until his retirement, serving as associate professor , professor , and dean of engineering .

#3818

Kip Siegel

1923 - 1975 (52 years)

Keeve Milton Siegel was an American physicist. He was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, and the founder of Conductron Corporation, a high-tech producer of electronic equipment which was absorbed by McDonnell Douglas Corporation; KMS Industries and KMS Fusion. KMS Fusion was the first private sector company to pursue controlled thermonuclear fusion energy production through use of laser technology.

#3819

Rosa Bouton

1860 - 1951 (91 years)

Rosa Bouton was an American chemist and professor who organized and directed the School of Domestic Science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1898. Despite the lack of funding, Rosa Bouton worked to provide a course to teach young women about the realms of domestic science. As years passed and the demand for more courses and areas of study emerged, Bouton, as the sole instructor, continued to strengthen and build the department to provide such an education to these women.

#3820

Louis Agricola Bauer

Louis Agricola Bauer

1865 - 1932 (67 years)

Louis Agricola Bauer was an American geophysicist, astronomer and magnetician. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1888, and he immediately started work for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. During 1895 and 1896, he was instructor in mathematical physics at the University of Chicago, after which he worked in various positions at different locations. The most important of these was as the first director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which was established in 1904. In this position, he set ...

#3821

Violet B. Haas

1926 - 1986 (60 years)

Violet Bushwick Haas was an American applied mathematician specializing in control theory and optimal estimation who became a professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University College of Engineering.

#3822

Yves Langevin

#3823

Stephen John Watson

1898 - 1976 (78 years)

Sir Stephen John Watson FRSE FRIC FRAgS CBE was a 20th-century British agriculturalist. He had an expert knowledge of the nutritional values of hay, straw and silage under different conditions. In 1947 he founded the Edinburgh Centre of Rural Economy at Bush House, near Penicuik.

#3824

Robert Retherford

1912 - 1981 (69 years)

Robert Curtis Retherford was an American physicist. He was a graduate student of Willis Lamb at Columbia Radiation Laboratory. Retherford and Lamb performed the famous experiment revealing Lamb shift in the fine structure of hydrogen, a decisive experimental step toward a new understanding of quantum electrodynamics.

#3825

Samuel H. Caldwell

1904 - 1960 (56 years)

Samuel Hawks Caldwell was an American electrical engineer, known for his contributions to the early computers. Early life and education Caldwell enrolled at MIT in 1921, where he completed his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. His M.Sc. thesis was entitled Electrical characteristics and theory of operation of a dry electrolytic rectifier . In his doctoral studies he worked on analog computers with Vannevar Bush, developing the Differential Analyzer. His Sc.D., advised by Bush, was entitled The Extension and Application of Differential Analyzer Technique ...

#3826

Max M. Frocht

1894 - 1974 (80 years)

Max Mark Frocht was a Polish-American engineer and educator. He was a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and founder of the Laboratory for Experimental Stress Analysis. Education Max Mark Frocht had moved from Congress Poland to the United States in 1912, settling in Detroit where he worked as a machinist and tool maker. In 1916 he enrolled in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, earning his B.S. in 1920. He received an M.S. in physics in 1925 from the University of Pittsburgh, before retiring to the University of Michigan to earn a Ph.D. in 1931 with Stephen ...

#3827

Samuel Soloveichik

1909 - 1967 (58 years)

Dr. Samuel Soloveichik was an Orthodox Jewish chemist and talmudist. Early life Born in Pruzhany, Samuel Soloveichik was the second son of Rabbi Moshe Soloveichik. He was the brother of rabbis Joseph Soloveitchik and Ahron Soloveichik . He had two sisters, Mrs. Shulamith Meiselman , and Mrs. Anne Gerber .

#3828

Samuel Herrick

1911 - 1975 (64 years)

Samuel Herrick was an American astronomer who specialized in celestial mechanics and made important studies preceding the development of manned space flight. Life Herrick was born in Madison County, Virginia, in 1911.

#3829

Su-Shu Huang

1915 - 1977 (62 years)

Su-Shu Huang was a Chinese-born American astrophysicist. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Huang began his career with the study of the continuous absorption coefficientss of two-electron systems, but eventually his research focus turned to the study of stellar atmospheres, radiative transfer, and binary and multiple star systems. In subsequent years, Huang began to cover the topic of life on extrasolar planets and the prerequisites thereof, coining the term "habitable zone" to refer to the region around a star where planets could support liquid water at their surfaces at a 1959 confer...

#3830

Ernest Edwin Sechler

1905 - 1979 (74 years)

Ernest Edwin Sechler was an aerospace engineer and scientist who specialized in thin-shell structures. He earned his doctorate in 1934 at Caltech as one of the early students of Theodore von Kármán with a dissertation on the mechanics of thin-plate compression.

#3831

Oliver Patterson Watts

1865 - 1953 (88 years)

Oliver Patterson Watts was a professor of chemical engineering and applied electrochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Born in Thomaston, Maine, Watts received his bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in 1889. He received his doctoral degree in 1905; he was the first person to be awarded a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he served as a professor until 1935, after which he was an emeritus professor in the university's college of engineering. Watts is known for his development of the hot nickel plating bath known as the "Watts Bath", which he f...

#3832

John Pasta

1918 - 1981 (63 years)

John Robert Pasta was an American computational physicist and computer scientist who is remembered today for the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou experiment, the result of which was much discussed among physicists and researchers in the fields of dynamical systems and chaos theory, and as the head of the department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1964 to 1970.

Image Attributions