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,
#51
Michael J. S. Dewar
#8069
Overall Influence
1918 - 1997 (79 years)
Michael James Steuart Dewar was an American theoretical chemist. Education and early life Dewar was the son of Scottish parents, Annie Balfour and Francis Dewar. He received the degrees of Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and DPhil from Balliol College, Oxford.
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Peter Atkins
#3711
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Peter William Atkins is an English chemist and a Fellow of Lincoln College at the University of Oxford. He retired in 2007. He is a prolific writer of popular chemistry textbooks, including Physical Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Quantum Mechanics. Atkins is also the author of a number of popular science books, including Atkins' Molecules, Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science and On Being.
Go to Profile#53
Yuan T. Lee
#843
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Yuan Tseh Lee is a Taiwanese chemist and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate who, along with the Hungarian-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes".
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George Porter
#2295
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
George Porter, Baron Porter of Luddenham, was a British chemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967. Education and early life Porter was born in Stainforth, near Thorne, in the then West Riding of Yorkshire. He was educated at Thorne Grammar School, then won a scholarship to the University of Leeds and gained his first degree in chemistry. During his degree, Porter was taught by Meredith Gwynne Evans, who he later said was the most brilliant chemist he had ever met. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1949 for research investigating free radicals produced by photochemical means.
Go to Profile#55
John Cornforth
#2244
Overall Influence
1917 - 2013 (96 years)
Sir John Warcup Cornforth Jr., was an AustralianBritish chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975 for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalysed reactions, becoming the only Nobel laureate born in New South Wales.
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Dieter Seebach
#9950
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Dieter Seebach is a German chemist known for his synthesis of biopolymers and dendrimers, and for his contributions to stereochemistry. He was born on 31 October 1937 in Karlsruhe. He studied chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe under the supervision of Rudolf Criegee and at Harvard University with Elias Corey finishing in 1969. After his habilitation he became professor for organic chemistry at the University of Giessen. After six years he was appointed professor at the ETH Zurich where he worked until he retired in 2003.
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Ada Yonath
#810
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#58
Yves Chauvin
#3529
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Yves Chauvin was a French chemist and Nobel Prize laureate. He was honorary research director at the Institut français du pétrole and a member of the French Academy of Science. He was known for his work for deciphering the process of olefin metathesis for which he was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock.
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Oktay Sinanoğlu
#3832
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Oktay Sinanoğlu was a Turkish physical chemist and molecular biophysicist who made significant contributions to the theory of electron correlation in molecules, quantum chemistry, and the theory of solvation.
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George M. Sheldrick
#9455
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
George Michael Sheldrick, FRS is a British chemist who specialises in molecular structure determination. He is one of the most cited workers in the field, having over 280,000 citations as of 2020 and an h-index of 113. He was a professor at the University of Göttingen from 1978 until his retirement in 2011.
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George S. Hammond
#8078
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
George Simms Hammond was an American scientist and theoretical chemist who developed "Hammond's postulate", and fathered organic photochemistry,–the general theory of the geometric structure of the transition state in an organic chemical reaction. Hammond's research is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. His research garnered him the Norris Award in 1968, the Priestley Medal in 1976, the National Medal of Science in 1994, and the Othmer Gold Medal in 2003. He served as the executive chairman of the Allied Chemical Corporation from 1979 to 1989.
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Ben Feringa
#2916
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#63
Robert Freitas
#2124
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert A. Freitas Jr. is an American nanotechnologist. Early life and education Freitas was born in Camden, Maine. His father worked in agriculture and his mother was a homemaker. Freitas married Nancy, his childhood sweetheart in 1974.
Go to Profile#64
Gilbert Stork
#5407
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Gilbert Stork was an organic chemist. For a quarter of a century he was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Columbia University. He is known for making significant contributions to the total synthesis of natural products, including a lifelong fascination with the synthesis of quinine. In so doing he also made a number of contributions to mechanistic understanding of reactions, and performed pioneering work on enamine chemistry, leading to development of the Stork enamine alkylation. It is believed he was responsible for the first planned stereocontrolled synthesis as well as...
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Rolf Huisgen
#7884
Overall Influence
1920 - 2020 (100 years)
Rolf Huisgen was a German chemist. His importance in synthetic organic chemistry extends to the enormous influence he had in post-war chemistry departments in Germany and Austria, due to a large number of his habilitants becoming professors. His major achievement was the development of the 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reaction, also called the Huisgen cycloaddition.
Go to Profile#66
Alan J. Heeger
#3491
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Alan Jay Heeger is an American physicist, academic and Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. Heegar was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for co-founding the field of conducting polymers and for pioneering work in making these novel materials available for technological applications.
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Robert Parr
#8874
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Robert Ghormley Parr was an American theoretical chemist who was a professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Career Parr received an A. B. degree magna cum laude from Brown University in 1942, and then entered the University of Minnesota, receiving a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1947. He joined the faculty at Minnesota upon receiving his Ph.D. and remained there one year. In 1948 he moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, becoming a full professor in 1957. In 1962 he moved to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland...
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Albert Ghiorso
#3054
Overall Influence
1915 - 2010 (95 years)
Albert Ghiorso was an American nuclear scientist and co-discoverer of a record 12 chemical elements on the periodic table. His research career spanned six decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1990s.
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Zhong Lin Wang
#8664
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
#70
Luis E. Miramontes
#4154
Overall Influence
1925 - 2004 (79 years)
Luis Ernesto Miramontes Cárdenas was a Mexican chemist known as co-inventor and the first to synthesize an oral contraceptive, progestin norethisterone. Career Summary Miramontes was born in Tepic, Nayarit. He obtained his first Degree in chemical engineering at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México . He was a founding researcher of the Institute of Chemistry of UNAM, specializing mainly in the area of Organic Chemistry. He was a professor of the Faculty of Chemistry of UNAM, Director and professor of the School of Chemistry at the Universidad Iberoamericana, and deputy director of research at the Mexican Institute of Petroleum .
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Stuart A. Rice
#8876
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Stuart Alan Rice is an American theoretical chemist and physical chemist. He is well known as a theoretical chemist who also does experimental research, having spent much of his career working in multiple areas of physical chemistry. He is currently the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. During his tenure at the University of Chicago, Rice has trained more than 100 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999.
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Thomas Cech
#2511
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Thomas Robert Cech is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, suggesting that life might have started as RNA. He found that RNA can not only transmit instructions, but also that it can speed up the necessary reactions.
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Stephen L. Buchwald
#11225
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Stephen L. Buchwald is a U.S. chemist and Camille Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry at MIT. He is known for his involvement in the development of the Buchwald-Hartwig amination and the discovery of the dialkylbiaryl phosphine ligand family for promoting this reaction and related transformations. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and 2008, respectively.
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Alan MacDiarmid
#2686
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Alan Graham MacDiarmid, ONZ FRS was a New Zealand-born American chemist, and one of three recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000. Early life and education MacDiarmid was born in Masterton, New Zealand as one of five children – three brothers and two sisters. His family was relatively poor, and the Great Depression made life difficult in Masterton, due to which his family shifted to Lower Hutt, a few miles from Wellington, New Zealand. At around age ten, he developed an interest in chemistry from one of his father's old textbooks, and he taught himself from this book and from libr...
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Alexander Shulgin
#941
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Alexander Theodore "Sasha" Shulgin was an American medicinal chemist, biochemist, organic chemist, pharmacologist, psychopharmacologist, and author. He is credited with introducing 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine to psychologists in the late 1970s for psychopharmaceutical use and for the discovery, synthesis and personal bioassay of over 230 psychoactive compounds for their psychedelic and entactogenic potential.
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Albert Hofmann
#389
Overall Influence
1906 - 2008 (102 years)
Albert Hofmann was a Swiss chemist known for being the first to synthesize, ingest, and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide . Hofmann's team also isolated, named and synthesized the principal psychedelic mushroom compounds psilocybin and psilocin. He authored more than 100 scientific articles and numerous books, including LSD: Mein Sorgenkind . In 2007, he shared first place with Tim Berners-Lee on a list of the 100 greatest living geniuses published by The Daily Telegraph newspaper.
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Avram Hershko
#992
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Avram Hershko is a Hungarian-Israeli biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004. Biography He was born Herskó Ferenc in Karcag, Hungary, into a Jewish family, the son of Shoshana/Margit 'Manci' and Moshe Hershko, both teachers. During the Second World War, his father was forced into labor service in the Hungarian army and then taken as a prisoner by the Soviet Army. For years, Avram's family didn't known anything about what had happened to his father. Avram, his mother and older brother were put in a ghetto in Szolnok. During the final days of the ghetto, most Jews were sen...
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Kenneth Pitzer
#9106
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer was an American physical and theoretical chemist, educator, and university president. He was described as "one of the most influential physical chemists of his era" whose work "spanned almost all of the important fields of physical chemistry: thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, molecular structure, quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, chemical bonding, relativistic chemical effects, properties of concentrated aqueous salt solutions, kinetics, and conformational analysis."
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Ralph Pearson
#10953
Overall Influence
1919 - 2022 (103 years)
Ralph Gottfrid Pearson was an American physical inorganic chemist best known for the development of the concept of hard and soft acids and bases . He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1943 from Northwestern University, and taught chemistry at Northwestern faculty from 1946 until 1976, when he moved to University of California at Santa Barbara . He retired in 1989 but remained active in research in theoretical inorganic chemistry until his death.
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Osamu Shimomura
#1830
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Osamu Shimomura was a Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist, and professor emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Boston University School of Medicine. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein with two American scientists: Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California-San Diego.
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Yoshito Kishi
#9261
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
was a Japanese chemist who was the Morris Loeb Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. He was known for his contributions to the sciences of organic synthesis and total synthesis. Early life and education Kishi was born in Nagoya, Japan and attended Nagoya University, where he obtained both his BS and PhD degrees. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University where he worked with Robert Burns Woodward. From 1966 through 1974, he was a professor of chemistry at Nagoya University. Since 1974, Kishi had been a professor of chemistry at Harvard University.
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Donald Truhlar
#12168
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Donald Gene Truhlar is an American scientist working in theoretical and computational chemistry and chemical physics with special emphases on quantum mechanics and chemical dynamics. Early life, education, and early work Donald Gene Truhlar was born in Chicago on 27 February 1944 to John Joseph Truhlar and Lucille Marie Vancura, both of Czech ancestry. Truhlar received a B.A., from St. Mary's College of Minnesota , and a Ph. D., from Caltech , under Aron Kuppermann. He has been on the faculty of the University of Minnesota from 1969–present.
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Barry Trost
#12768
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Barry M. Trost is an American chemist who is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor Emeritus in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. The Tsuji-Trost reaction and the Trost ligand are named after him. He is prominent for advancing the concept of atom economy.
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Krzysztof Matyjaszewski
#6164
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Krzysztof "Kris" Matyjaszewski is a Polish-American chemist. He is the J.C. Warner Professor of the Natural Sciences at the Carnegie Mellon University Matyjaszewski is best known for the discovery of atom transfer radical polymerization , a novel method of polymer synthesis that has revolutionized the way macromolecules are made.
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Ronald Breslow
#6097
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Ronald Charles David Breslow was an American chemist from Rahway, New Jersey. He was University Professor at Columbia University, where he was based in the Department of Chemistry and affiliated with the Departments of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology; he had also been on the faculty of its Department of Chemical Engineering. He had taught at Columbia since 1956 and was a former chair of the university's chemistry department.
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Robert Huber
#1306
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert Huber is a German biochemist and Nobel laureate. known for his work crystallizing an intramembrane protein important in photosynthesis and subsequently applying X-ray crystallography to elucidate the protein's structure.
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Akira Suzuki
#2697
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
#88
Harry B. Gray
#7612
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Harry Barkus Gray is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. Career Gray received his B.S. in chemistry from Western Kentucky University in 1957. He began his work in inorganic chemistry at Northwestern University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1960 working under Fred Basolo and Ralph Pearson. He was initiated into the Upsilon chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma at Northwestern University in 1958. After that, he spent a year as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, where, along with Walter A. Manch, he collaborated with Carl J. Ballhaus...
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Teruaki Mukaiyama
#11451
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Teruaki Mukaiyama was a Japanese organic chemist. One of the most prolific chemists of the 20th century in the field of organic synthesis, Mukaiyama helped establish the field of organic chemistry in Japan after World War II.
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William Lipscomb
#3845
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
William Nunn Lipscomb Jr. was a Nobel Prize-winning American inorganic and organic chemist working in nuclear magnetic resonance, theoretical chemistry, boron chemistry, and biochemistry. Biography Overview Lipscomb was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His family moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1920, and he lived there until he received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at the University of Kentucky in 1941. He went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1946.
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Harden M. McConnell
#8773
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Harden M. McConnell was an American physical chemist. His many awards included the National Medal of Science and the Wolf Prize, and he was elected to the National Academy of Science." Education and career Harden earned a B.S. degree in chemistry from George Washington University in 1947, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1951 with Norman Davidson. After serving for two years as a National Research Fellow in physics at the University of Chicago with Robert S. Mulliken and John Platt, he held a position as research chemist at Shell Development Company. He was recruited by Norman Davidson, John D.
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Barry Halliwell
#14382
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Barry Halliwell is an English biochemist, chemist and university administrator, specialising in free radical metabolism in both animals and plants. His name is included in the "Foyer–Halliwell–Asada" pathway, a cellular process of hydrogen peroxide metabolism in plants and animals, named for the three principal discoverers, with Christine Foyer and Kozi Asada. He moved to Singapore in 2000, and served as Deputy President of the National University of Singapore , where he continues to hold a Tan Chin Tuan Centennial professorship.
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Mario Molina
#3833
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Mario José Molina Henríquez was a Mexican physical chemist. He played a pivotal role in the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, and was a co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in discovering the threat to the Earth's ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbon gases. He was the first Mexican-born scientist to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the third Mexican-born person to receive a Nobel prize.
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Norman Greenwood
#11953
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Norman Neill Greenwood FRS CChem FRSC was an Australian-British chemist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds. Together with Alan Earnshaw, he wrote the textbook Chemistry of the Elements, first published in 1984.
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Akira Yoshino
#3850
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#96
Albert Eschenmoser
#6515
Overall Influence
1925 - 2023 (98 years)
Albert Jakob Eschenmoser was a Swiss organic chemist, best known for his work on the synthesis of complex heterocyclic natural compounds, most notably vitamin B12. In addition to his significant contributions to the field of organic synthesis, Eschenmoser pioneered work in the Origins of Life field with work on the synthetic pathways of artificial nucleic acids. Before retiring in 2009, Eschenmoser held tenured teaching positions at the ETH Zurich and The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California as well as visiting professorships at the ...
Go to Profile#97
Eric Scerri
#5561
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#98
James Bassham
#5030
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
James Alan Bassham was an American scientist known for his work on photosynthesis. He received a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1945 from the University of California, Berkeley, earning his Ph.D. degree from Berkeley in 1949. His graduate studies were on the subject of carbon reduction during photosynthesis, working with Melvin Calvin in the Bio-Organic Chemistry Group of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California. He discovered, with Melvin Calvin and Andrew Benson, the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle. He continued his work as Associate Director of this group.
Go to Profile#99
Jean-Pierre Sauvage
#6076
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#100
Henry Taube
#3721
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Henry Taube, was a Canadian-born American chemist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his work in the mechanisms of electron-transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He was the second Canadian-born chemist to win the Nobel Prize, and remains the only Saskatchewanian-born Nobel laureate. Taube completed his undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Saskatchewan, and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. After finishing graduate school, Taube worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University.
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