The Most Influential People Across History
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 in Chemistry,
#1
Linus Pauling
#50
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of five people to have won more than one Nobel Prize . Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two peo...
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John Pople
#858
Overall Influence
1925 - 2004 (79 years)
Sir John Anthony Pople was a British theoretical chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Kohn in 1998 for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry. Early life and education Pople was born in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, and attended the Bristol Grammar School. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1943. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1946. Between 1945 and 1947 he worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company. He then returned to the University of Cambridge and was awarded his PhD in mathematics in 1951 on lone pair electrons.
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Roald Hoffmann
#625
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Roald Hoffmann is a Polish-American theoretical chemist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has also published plays and poetry. He is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, emeritus, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.
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K. Eric Drexler
#595
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kim Eric Drexler is an American engineer best known for introducing molecular nanotechnology , and his studies of its potential from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was revised and published as the book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation , which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992. He has been called the "godfather of nanotechnology".
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Richard Smalley
#904
Overall Influence
1943 - 2005 (62 years)
Richard Errett Smalley was an American chemist who was the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy at Rice University. In 1996, along with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene, also known as buckyballs. He was an advocate of nanotechnology and its applications.
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Glenn T. Seaborg
#410
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Glenn Theodore Seaborg was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of ten transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His work in this area also led to his development of the actinide concept and the arrangement of the actinide series in the periodic table of the elements.
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Jean-Marie Lehn
#932
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#8
Vladimir Prelog
#1273
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Vladimir Prelog was a Croatian-Swiss organic chemist who received the 1975 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. Prelog was born and grew up in Sarajevo. He lived and worked in Prague, Zagreb and Zürich during his lifetime.
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Carl Djerassi
#756
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Carl Djerassi was an Austrian-born Bulgarian-American pharmaceutical chemist, novelist, playwright and co-founder of Djerassi Resident Artists Program with Diane Wood Middlebrook. He is best known for his contribution to the development of oral contraceptive pillss, nicknamed the "father of the pill".
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Donald J. Cram
#1981
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Donald James Cram was an American chemist who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jean-Marie Lehn and Charles J. Pedersen "for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity." They were the founders of the field of host–guest chemistry.
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Robert H. Grubbs
#2562
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
#12
Herbert C. Brown
#1980
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Herbert Charles Brown was an American chemist and recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with organoboranes. Life and career Brown was born Herbert Brovarnik in London, to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Zhitomir, Pearl and Charles Brovarnik, a hardware store manager and carpenter. His family moved to Chicago in June 1914, when he was two years old. Brown attended Crane Junior College in Chicago, where he met Sarah Baylen, whom he would later marry. The college was under threat of closing, and Brown and Baylen transferred to Wright Junior College. In 1935 he left Wri...
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Martin Karplus
#1254
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
#14
F. Albert Cotton
#3405
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Frank Albert Cotton FRS was an American chemist. He was the W.T. Doherty-Welch Foundation Chair and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. He authored over 1600 scientific articles. Cotton was recognized for his research on the chemistry of the transition metals.
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Richard R. Schrock
#2945
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Richard Royce Schrock is an American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized for his contributions to the olefin metathesis reaction used in organic chemistry. Education Born in Berne, Indiana, Schrock went to Mission Bay High School in San Diego, California. He holds a B.A. from the University of California, Riverside and a Ph.D. from Harvard University under the direction of John A. Osborn .
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Melvin Calvin
#678
Overall Influence
1911 - 1997 (86 years)
Melvin Ellis Calvin was an American biochemist known for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of his five-decade career at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Richard F. Heck
#2140
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Richard Frederick Heck was an American chemist noted for the discovery and development of the Heck reaction, which uses palladium to catalyze organic chemical reactionss that couple aryl halides with alkenes. The analgesic naproxen is an example of a compound that is prepared industrially using the Heck reaction.
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Manfred Eigen
#653
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Manfred Eigen was a German biophysical chemist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on measuring fast chemical reactions. Eigen's research helped solve major problems in physical chemistry and aided in the understanding of chemical processes that occur in living organisms.
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Gerhard Ertl
#1120
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Gerhard Ertl is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Department of Physical Chemistry, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. Ertl's research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells produce energy without pollution, how catalytic converters clean up car exhausts and even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
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Elias James Corey
#2414
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
#21
George Andrew Olah
#1784
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
George Andrew Olah was a Hungarian-American chemist. His research involved the generation and reactivity of carbocations via superacids. For this research, Olah was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994 "for his contribution to carbocation chemistry." He was also awarded the Priestley Medal, the highest honor granted by the American Chemical Society and F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research of the American Chemical Society in 1996.
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Rudolph A. Marcus
#1363
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Rudolph Arthur Marcus is a Canadian-born chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems". Marcus theory, named after him, provides a thermodynamic and kinetic framework for describing one electron outer-sphere electron transfer. He is a professor at Caltech, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.
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Robert Curl
#2157
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Robert Floyd Curl Jr. was an American chemist who was Pitzer–Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences and professor of chemistry at Rice University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for the discovery of the nanomaterial buckminsterfullerene, and hence the fullerene class of materials, along with Richard Smalley and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex.
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Geoffrey Wilkinson
#2644
Overall Influence
1921 - 1996 (75 years)
Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson FRS was a Nobel laureate English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis. Education and early life Wilkinson was born at Springside, Todmorden, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, Henry Wilkinson, was a master house painter and decorator; his mother, Ruth, worked in a local cotton mill. One of his uncles, an organist and choirmaster, had married into a family that owned a small chemical company making Epsom and Glauber's salts for the pharmaceutical industry; this is where he first developed an interest in chemistry.
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Derek Barton
#3157
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Sir Derek Harold Richard Barton was an English organic chemist and Nobel Prize laureate for 1969. Education and early life Barton was born in Gravesend, Kent, to William Thomas and Maude Henrietta Barton .
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Aaron Klug
#373
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Sir Aaron Klug was a British biophysicist and chemist. He was a winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.
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Gerhard Herzberg
#1242
Overall Influence
1904 - 1999 (95 years)
Gerhard Heinrich Friedrich Otto Julius Herzberg, was a German-Canadian pioneering physicist and physical chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals". Herzberg's main work concerned atomic and molecular spectroscopy. He is well known for using these techniques that determine the structures of diatomic and polyatomic molecules, including free radicals which are difficult to investigate in any other way, and for the chemical analysis of astronomical objects. Herzbe...
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Ei-ichi Negishi
#1811
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
#29
Allen J. Bard
#4868
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
#30
Richard R. Ernst
#1905
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Richard Robert Ernst was a Swiss physical chemist and Nobel laureate. Ernst was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991 for his contributions towards the development of Fourier transform nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy while at Varian Associates and ETH Zurich. These underpin applications to both to chemistry with NMR spectroscopy and to medicine with magnetic resonance imaging .
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Karl Barry Sharpless
#2111
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Karl Barry Sharpless is an American stereochemist. He is a two-time Nobel laureate in Chemistry known for his work on stereoselective reactions and click chemistry. Sharpless was awarded half of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions", and one third of the 2022 prize, jointly with Carolyn R. Bertozzi and Morten P. Meldal, "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry". Sharpless is the fifth person , to have twice been awarded a Nobel prize, along with Marie Curie, John Bardeen, Linus Pauling and Frederick Sanger, and th...
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Ernst Otto Fischer
#2357
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Ernst Otto Fischer was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work in the area of organometallic chemistry. Early life He was born in Solln, a borough of Munich. His parents were Karl T. Fischer, Professor of Physics at the Technical University of Munich , and Valentine née Danzer. He graduated in 1937 with Abitur. Before the completion of two years' compulsory military service, the Second World War broke out, and he served in Poland, France, and Russia. During a period of study leave, towards the end of 1941 he began to study chemistry at the Technical University of Munich....
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Ilya Prigogine
#200
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine was a Belgian physical chemist of Russian-Jewish origin, noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility. Prigogine's work most notably earned him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as well as the Francqui Prize in 1955 and the Rumford Medal in 1976.
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John B. Goodenough
#1173
Overall Influence
1922 - 2023 (101 years)
John Bannister Goodenough was an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. From 1996 he was a professor of Mechanical, Materials Science, and Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is credited with identifying the Goodenough–Kanamori rules of the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, with developing materials for computer random-access memory and with inventing cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries.
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Joachim Sauer
#4982
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joachim Sauer is a German quantum chemist and professor emeritus of physical and theoretical chemistry at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is the husband of the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. He is one of the seven members of the board of trustees of the Friede Springer Foundation, together with former German president Horst Köhler and others.
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George M. Whitesides
#3663
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
George McClelland Whitesides is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He is best known for his work in the areas of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft lithography, microfabrication, microfluidics, and nanotechnology. A prolific author and patent holder who has received many awards, he received the highest Hirsch index rating of all living chemists in 2011.
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Kenichi Fukui
#3286
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Kenichi Fukui was a Japanese chemist, known as the first person of East Asian ancestry to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Fukui was co-recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Roald Hoffmann, for their independent investigations into the mechanisms of chemical reactions. Fukui's prize-winning work focused on the role of frontier orbitals in chemical reactions: specifically that molecules share loosely bonded electrons which occupy the frontier orbitals, that is, the Highest Occupied Molecular Orbital and the Lowest Unoccupied Molecular Orbital .
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Kurt Wüthrich
#1448
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Kurt Wüthrich is a Swiss chemist/biophysicist and Nobel Chemistry laureate, known for developing nuclear magnetic resonance methods for studying biological macromolecules. Education and early life Born in Aarberg, Switzerland, Wüthrich was educated in chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the University of Bern before pursuing his PhD supervised by Silvio Fallab at the University of Basel, awarded in 1964.
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Sumio Iijima
#2044
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#40
C. N. R. Rao
#1433
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Chintamani Nagesa Ramachandra Rao, , is an Indian chemist who has worked mainly in solid-state and structural chemistry. He has honorary doctorates from 84 universities from around the world and has authored around 1,800 research publications and 56 books. He is described as a scientist who had won all possible awards in his field except the Nobel Prize.
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John D. Roberts
#6679
Overall Influence
1918 - 2016 (98 years)
John Dombrowski Roberts was an American chemist. He made contributions to the integration of physical chemistry, spectroscopy, and organic chemistry for the understanding of chemical reaction rates. Another characteristic of Roberts' work was the early use of NMR, focusing on the concept of spin coupling.
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Ahmed Zewail
#1951
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Ahmed Hassan Zewail was an Egyptian and American chemist, known as the "father of femtochemistry". He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Egyptian and Arab to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field, and the second African to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry, a professor of physics, and the director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.
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Stephanie Kwolek
#1755
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Stephanie Louise Kwolek was a Polish-American chemist who is known for inventing Kevlar. Her career at the DuPont company spanned more than 40 years. She discovered the first of a family of synthetic fibers of exceptional strength and stiffness: poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide.
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Fraser Stoddart
#2501
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Sir James Fraser Stoddart is a British-American chemist who is Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and head of the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States. He works in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. Stoddart has developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes and rotaxanes utilising molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes. He has demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches.
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Dorothy Hodgkin
#580
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin was a Nobel Prize-winning British chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules, which became essential for structural biology.
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Robert Samuel Langer, Jr.
#2232
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Samuel Langer Jr. FREng is an American biotechnologist, businessman, chemical engineer, chemist, and inventor. He is one of the twelve Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Michael Grätzel
#6471
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael Grätzel is a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he directs the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic-materials and their optoelectronic applications. He co-invented with Brian O'Regan the Grätzel cell in 1988.
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Hideki Shirakawa
#1901
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
is a Japanese chemist, engineer, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba and Zhejiang University. He is best known for his discovery of conductive polymers. He was co-recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Alan MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger.
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Harry Kroto
#2346
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Sir Harold Walter Kroto was an English chemist. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes. He was the recipient of many other honors and awards.
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David A. Evans
#7323
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
David A. Evans was an American chemist who was the Abbott and James Lawrence professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He was a prominent figure in the field of organic chemistry and his research focused on synthetic chemistry and total synthesis, particularly of large biologically active molecules. Among his best-known works is the development of aldol reaction methodology .
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