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

#401

Carolyn Porco

#17046

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Carolyn C. Porco is an American planetary scientist who explores the outer Solar System, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She led the imaging science team on the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus.

#402

Hans W. Liepmann

#17071

Overall Influence

1914 - 2009 (95 years)

Hans Wolfgang Liepmann was an American fluid dynamicist, aerospace scientist and emeritus Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his numerous contributions in fluid mechanics covering a wide range of problem areas, such as flow instability and turbulence, gas kinetics, viscous compressible fluids and liquid helium flows.

#403

Nader Engheta

#17193

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Nader Engheta is an Iranian-American scientist. He has made pioneering contributions to the fields of metamaterials, transformation optics, plasmonic optics, nanophotonics, graphene photonics, nano-materials, nanoscale optics, nano-antennas and miniaturized antennas, physics and reverse-engineering of polarization vision in nature, bio-inspired optical imaging, fractional paradigm in electrodynamics, and electromagnetics and microwaves.

#404

Beverly Berger

#17197

Overall Influence

Beverly K. Berger is an American physicist known for her work on gravitational physics, especially gravitational waves, gravitons, and gravitational singularities. Alongside Berger's more serious physics research, she is also known for noticing that vibrational patterns caused by local ravens were interfering with observations at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

#405

Slobodan Ćuk

#17353

Overall Influence

Slobodan Ćuk is a Serbian author, inventor, business owner, electrical engineer, and professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology . The Ćuk switched-mode DC-to-DC voltage converter is named after him.

#406

Gerald B. Whitham

#17360

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Gerald Beresford Whitham FRS was a British–born American applied mathematician and the Charles Lee Powell Professor of Applied Mathematics of Applied & Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1953 under the direction of Sir James Lighthill. He is known for his work in fluid dynamics and waves.

#407

Lester Hogan

#17427

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

Clarence Lester Hogan was an American physicist and a pioneer in microwave and semiconductor technology. He grew up as a brother to three sisters in Great Falls, Montana, where his father worked for the Great Northern Railway. After graduating from Montana State University with a degree in chemical engineering he joined the United States Navy in 1942. He did some work on acoustic torpedoes in Chesapeake Bay, and when being approached by Bell Laboratories, subsequently went to the Pacific theatre to train submarine crews in the use of that technology.

#408

Steven Orszag

#17441

Overall Influence

1943 - 2011 (68 years)

Steven Alan Orszag was an American mathematician. Life and career Orszag was born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, the son of Joseph Orszag, a lawyer. Orszag's paternal grandparents were emigrants from Hungary. Orszag was raised in Forest Hills, Queens and graduated from Forest Hills High School. In 1962, at the age of 19, he graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. He did post graduate study at Cambridge University and in 1966 graduated with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University. His thesis adviser was Martin David Kruskal.

#409

William Andrew Goddard III

#17469

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

William Andrew Goddard III is the Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry and Applied Physics, and director of the Materials and Process Simulation Center at the California Institute of Technology.

#410

David C. Jewitt

David C. Jewitt

#17477

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

David Clifford Jewitt is a British-American astronomer who studies the Solar System, especially its minor bodies. He is based at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a Member of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, the Director of the Institute for Planets and Exoplanets, Professor of Astronomy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Professor of Astronomy in the Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. He is best known for being the first person to discover a body beyond Pluto and Charon in the Kuiper belt.

#411

Lois Graham

#17483

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Lois Graham was a professor of thermodynamics and cryogenics. She was the first woman to earn a mechanical engineering PhD in the United States. Graham is remembered for her lifelong work recruiting young women into careers in science and engineering. She taught for nearly 40 years in the Illinois Institute of Technology's Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering program. Graham founded IIT's Women in Science and Engineering program, which recruited female high school students into science and engineering careers.

#412

Geraint Rees

#17509

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Geraint Ellis Rees is Vice-Provost of research, innovation & global engagement at University College London . Previously he served as Dean of the UCL Faculty of Life Sciences, UCL Pro-Provost , Pro-Vice-Provost and a Professor of Cognitive Neurology at University College London. He is also a Director of UCL Business and a trustee of the Guarantors of Brain.

#413

John W. Miles

#17527

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

John Wilder Miles was a research professor emeritus of applied mechanics and geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He was well regarded for his pioneering work in theoretical fluid mechanics, and made fundamental contributions to understanding how wind energy transfers to waves.

#414

Bruce Bolt

#17529

Overall Influence

1930 - 2005 (75 years)

Bruce Alan Bolt was an Australian-born American seismologist and a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Bolt was known as a pioneer of engineering seismology. He served for 15 years on the California Seismic Safety Commission leading public debate on earthquake safety in that state, and acted as a consultant on major projects throughout the world. As well, Bolt published a number of popular and technical books on seismology.

#415

S. David Wu

#17540

Overall Influence

Szu-yung David Wu is a Taiwanese-American educator who is the President of Baruch College of the City University of New York since 2020. He is the first Asian-American appointed to this position at a CUNY college. Previously he held the position of Provost and Executive Vice President of George Mason University.

#416

Carolyn S. Shoemaker

Carolyn S. Shoemaker

#17579

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker was an American astronomer and a co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. She discovered 32 comets and more than 500 asteroids. Having earned degrees in history, political science, and English literature, she had little interest in science until she met and married geologist Eugene Merle Shoemaker. Her career in astronomy began when she demonstrated good stereoscopic vision, a particularly valuable quality for looking for objects in near-Earth space. Despite the fact that her degrees were not in science, having that visual ability motivated the California Institute of Technology to hire her as a research assistant on a team led by her husband.

#417

John R. Platt

#17630

Overall Influence

1918 - 1992 (74 years)

For other people named John Platt, see John Platt. John Rader Platt was an American physicist and biophysicist, professor at the University of Chicago, noted for his pioneering work on strong inference in the 1960s and his analysis of social science in the 1970s.

#418

Ali Hajimiri

#17634

Overall Influence

Ali Hajimiri is an academic, entrepreneur, and inventor in various fields of engineering, including electrical engineering and biomedical engineering. He is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology .

#419

Peter Schröder

#17861

Overall Influence

Peter Schröder is an American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at California Institute of Technology. Schröder is known for his contributions to discrete differential geometry and digital geometry processing. He is also a world expert in the area of wavelet based methods for computer graphics. In 2015, Schröder was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for "contributions to computer graphics and geometry processing.".

#420

Gerald J. Wasserburg

#17911

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Gerald J. Wasserburg was an American geologist. At the time of his death, he was the John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics, emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology. He was known for his work in the fields of isotope geochemistry, cosmochemistry, meteoritics, and astrophysics.

#421

Frank Neese

#17919

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Frank Neese is a German theoretical chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research. He is the author of more than 440 scientific articles in journals of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Physics. His work focuses on the theory of magnetic spectroscopies and their experimental and theoretical application, local pair natural orbital correlation theories, spectroscopy oriented configuration interaction, electronic and geometric structure and reactivity of transition metal complexes and metalloenzymes. He is lead author of the ORCA quantum chemistry computer program. His methods have been applie...

#422

James Charles Phillips

#17938

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

James Charles Phillips is an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences . Phillips invented the exact theory of the ionicity of chemical bonding in semiconductors, as well as new theories of compacted networks .

#423

Eleanor F. Helin

Eleanor F. Helin

#17976

Overall Influence

1932 - 2009 (77 years)

Eleanor Francis "Glo" Helin was an American astronomer. She was principal investigator of the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Helin was a prolific discoverer of minor planets and several comets, including periodic comets 111P/Helin–Roman–Crockett, 117P/Helin–Roman–Alu and 132P/Helin–Roman–Alu. She is credited as the discoverer of the object now known as both asteroid 4015 Wilson–Harrington and comet 107P/Wilson–Harrington. Although Wilson and Harrington preceded her by some decades, their observations did not establish an orbit for the object, while her rediscovery did.

#424

Louise Chow

#17983

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Louise Tsi Chow is a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a foreign associate with the National Academy of Sciences, known for her research on the human papillomavirus. Her research contributed to the discovery of gene splicing, and in 1993, her collaborator, Richard J. Roberts, received the Nobel Prize for the research, leading some to assert that Chow should have received the honor as well.

#425

Victor Shoup

#17991

Overall Influence

Victor Shoup is a computer scientist and mathematician. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1989, and he did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He is a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, focusing on algorithm and cryptography courses. He is currently a Principal Research Scientist at DFINITY and has held positions at AT&T Bell Labs, the University of Toronto, Saarland University, and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.

#426

Phil Karn

#18057

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Phil Karn is a retired American engineer from Lutherville, Maryland. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1978 and a master's degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. From 1979 until 1984, Karn worked at Bell Labs in Naperville, Illinois, and Murray Hill, New Jersey. From 1984 until 1991, he was with Bell Communications Research in Morristown, New Jersey. From 1991 through to his retirement, he worked at Qualcomm in San Diego, where he specialized in wireless data networking protocols, security, and cryptography.

#427

Robert G. Bergman

Robert G. Bergman

#18159

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

#428

Charles M. Lieber

Charles M. Lieber

#18233

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

#429

Andrea Prosperetti

#18332

Overall Influence

Andrea Prosperetti is the Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, the Berkhoff Professor of Applied Physics at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2012 . He is known for his work in the field of multiphase flows including bubble dynamics and cavitation.

#430

Samuel Buss

#18395

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Samuel R. Buss is an American computer scientist and mathematician who has made major contributions to the fields of mathematical logic, complexity theory and proof complexity. He is currently a professor at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.

#431

Apoorva D. Patel

Apoorva D. Patel

#18443

Overall Influence

Apoorva D. Patel is a professor at the Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is notable for his work on quantum algorithms, and the application of information theory concepts to understand the structure of genetic languages. His major field of work has been the theory of quantum chromodynamics, where he has used lattice gauge theory techniques to investigate spectral properties, phase transitions, and matrix elements.

#432

Chung-Yao Chao

#18499

Overall Influence

1902 - 1998 (96 years)

Chung-Yao Chao was a Chinese theoretical physicist. He studied the scattering of gamma rays in lead by pair production in 1930, without knowing that positrons were involved in the anomalously high scattering cross-section. When the positron was discovered by Carl David Anderson in 1932, confirming the existence of Paul Dirac's "antimatter", it became clear that positrons could explain Chung-Yao Chao's earlier experiments, with the gamma rays being emitted from electron-positron annihilation.

#433

Ben Wang

#18548

Overall Influence

Ben Wang is an American materials scientist who specializes in materials engineering, applying emerging technologies to improve the manufacturing of affordable composite materials. He is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, holds the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. Chair in Manufacturing, and is the Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute.

#434

Bunji Sakita

#18572

Overall Influence

1930 - 2002 (72 years)

was a Japanese-American theoretical physicist who made important contributions in quantum field theory, superstring theory and discovered supersymmetry in 1971. He was a distinguished professor of physics at the City College of New York.

#435

Jonathan Lunine

#18579

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Jonathan I. Lunine is an American planetary scientist and physicist. Lunine teaches at Cornell University, where he is the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and chair of the Department of Astronomy. Having published more than 380 research papers, Lunine is at the forefront of research into planet formation, evolution, and habitability. His work includes analysis of brown dwarfs, gas giants, and planetary satellites. Within the Solar System, bodies with potential organic chemistry and prebiotic conditions, particularly Saturn's moon Titan, have been the focus of Lunine's resea...

#436

Rafi Ahmed

#18634

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Rafi Ahmed is an Indian-American virologist and immunologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory University, where he is also the director of the Emory Vaccine Center and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Vaccine Research. In 2009, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

#437

Xiaodong Wang

#18659

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Xiaodong Wang is a Chinese-American biochemist best known for his work with apoptosis, one of the ways through which cells kill themselves. Early life and education Wang was born in Wuhan, China in 1963, and was raised in Xinxiang, Henan by his grandparents. His family was relatively well-educated. His grandfather was a high school English teacher, his grandmother a primary school teacher, and his great uncle a biology professor. His primary and secondary coincided with the Cultural Revolution, and he only started high school in 1978 at a top high school in Henan.

#438

Joseph Schlessinger

#18694

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Joseph Schlessinger is a Yugoslav-born Israeli-American biochemist and biophysician. He is chair of the Pharmacology Department at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as the founding director of the school's new Cancer Biology Institute. His area of research is signaling through tyrosine phosphorylation, which is important in many areas of cellular regulation, especially growth control and cancer. Schlessinger's work has led to an understanding of the mechanism of transmembrane signaling by receptor tyrosine kinases and how the resulting signals control cell...

#439

Robert Kirshner

Robert Kirshner

#18700

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Robert P. Kirshner is an American astronomer, Chief Program Officer for Science for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Clownes Research Professor of Science at Harvard University. Kirshner has worked in several areas of astronomy including the physics of supernovae, supernova remnants, the large-scale structure of the cosmos, and the use of supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe.

#440

Jawed Siddiqi

#18731

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Jawed Siddiqi FBCS is a Pakistani British computer scientist and software engineer. He is professor emeritus of software engineering at Sheffield Hallam University, England. He is the president of NCUP National Council of University Professors in the UK.

#441

John L. Heilbron

#18827

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

John Lewis Heilbron was an American historian of science best known for his work in the history of physics and the history of astronomy. He was Professor of History and Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and visiting professor at Yale University and the California Institute of Technology. He edited the academic journal Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences for twenty-five years.

#442

Cecilia R. Aragon

#18898

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon is an American computer scientist, professor, author, and champion aerobatic pilot who is best known as the co-inventor of the treap data structure, a type of binary search tree that orders nodes by adding a priority as well as a key to each node. She is also known for her work in data-intensive science and visual analytics of very large data sets, for which she received the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers .

#443

Richard H. Bube

#18914

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Richard H. Bube was an American scientist. Academic career Bube received his B.S. in physics from Brown University in 1946 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He was a researcher at RCA Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1948 to 1962. Thereafter he taught at Stanford University where he was an associate professor from 1962 to 1964, when he became professor of materials science and electrical engineering. He served as his department's chair from 1975 to 1986 and is now an emeritus professor

#444

Leon Silver

#18934

Overall Influence

1925 - 2022 (97 years)

Leon Theodore "Lee" Silver was an American geologist who was professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology . He was an instructor to the Apollo 13, 15, 16, and 17 astronaut crews. Working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration , he taught astronauts how to perform field geology, essentially creating lunar field geology as a new discipline. His training is credited with a significant improvement in the J-Mission Apollo flights' scientific returns. After the Apollo program, he became a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1974. He retired in 1996 as the W.

#445

Marshall Clagett

#18937

Overall Influence

1916 - 2005 (89 years)

Marshall Clagett was an American historian of science who specialized in medieval science. John Murdoch describes him as "a distinguished medievalist" who was "the last member of a triumvirate [with Henry Guerlac and I. Bernard Cohen, who] … established the history of science as a recognized discipline within American universities" while Edward Grant ranks him "among the greatest historians and scholars of the twentieth century."

#446

Hung Cheng

#18943

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Hung Cheng , also known as Hong Zheng,is an American mathematician, novelist, and physicist teaching at MIT. Education Cheng received his B.Sc and the Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology, in 1959 and 1961. He had post-doctorate research appointments at Caltech, Princeton University and Harvard University before joining the MIT faculty in applied mathematics in 1965. His doctoral advisor was Leverett Davis, Jr., and his thesis was on spin absorption lines of solids.

#447

Anima Anandkumar

#18962

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Animashree Anandkumar is the Bren Professor of Computing at California Institute of Technology. She is a director of Machine Learning research at NVIDIA. Her research considers tensor-algebraic methods, deep learning and non-convex problems.

#448

Eric H. Davidson

#19016

Overall Influence

1937 - 2015 (78 years)

Eric Harris Davidson was an American developmental biologist at the California Institute of Technology. Davidson was best known for his pioneering work on the role of gene regulation in evolution, on embryonic specification and for spearheading the effort to sequence the genome of the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. He devoted a large part of his professional career to developing an understanding of embryogenesis at the genetic level. He wrote many academic works describing his work, including a textbook on early animal development.

#449

Victor Vacquier

#19035

Overall Influence

1907 - 2009 (102 years)

Victor Vacquier, Sr. was a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Vacquier was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1920, Vacquier escaped the Russian Civil War with his family, taking a horse-drawn sleigh across the ice of the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki, then moving to France and to the United States. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1927 from the University of Wisconsin, and a master's degree in physics in 1929, but never earned a Ph.D. He worked for Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of Gulf Oi...

#450

R. Michael Rich

#19046

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Robert Michael Rich is an American astrophysicist. He obtained his B.A. at Pomona College in 1979 and earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1986 under thesis supervisor Jeremy R. Mould. He was a Carnegie Fellow at Carnegie/DTM until 1988 when he joined the faculty of Columbia University where he was the doctoral thesis adviser to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and is on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions