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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,

#6001

Malcolm Dole

1903 - 1990 (87 years)

Malcolm Dole was an American chemist known for the Dole Effect in which he proved that the atomic weight of oxygen in air is greater than that of oxygen in water and for his work on electrospray ionization, polymer chemistry, and electrochemistry.

#6002

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

1897 - 1967 (70 years)

Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood was a British physical chemist and expert in chemical kinetics. His work in reaction mechanisms earned the 1956 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Education Born in London, his parents were Norman Macmillan Hinshelwood, a chartered accountant, and Ethel Frances née Smith. He was educated first in Canada, returning in 1905 on the death of his father to a small flat in Chelsea where he lived for the rest of his life. He then studied at Westminster City School and Balliol College, Oxford.

#6003

Arthur David Ritchie

1891 - 1967 (76 years)

Arthur David Ritchie FRSE was a British chemical physiologist and philosopher. Life He was born Oxford on 22 June 1891 the son of Prof David George Ritchie. The family moved to St Andrews in 1894 when his father was given a new professorship there.

#6004

Arthur Lindo Patterson

1902 - 1966 (64 years)

Arthur Lindo Patterson was a pioneering British X-ray crystallographer. Patterson was born to British parents in New Zealand in 1902. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Montreal, Canada and later to London, England. In 1920 Patterson moved to Canada for college at McGill University, Montreal. Firstly he concentrated on Mathematics and but then changed his major to Physics. He received his bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's in 1924. His master's thesis was on the production of hard X-rays by interaction of radium β rays with solids.

#6005

Yakov Zeldovich

Yakov Zeldovich

1914 - 1987 (73 years)

Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich , also known as YaB, was a leading Soviet physicist of Belarusian origin, who is known for his prolific contributions in physical cosmology, physics of thermonuclear reactions, combustion, and hydrodynamical phenomena.

#6006

Karl Freudenberg

1886 - 1983 (97 years)

Karl Johann Freudenberg was a German chemist who did early seminal work on the absolute configurations to carbohydrates, terpenes, and steroids, and on the structure of cellulose and other polysaccharides, and on the nature, structure, and biosynthesis of lignin. The Research Institute for the Chemistry of Wood and Polysaccharides at the University of Heidelberg was created for him in the mid to late 1930s, and he led this until 1969.

#6007

E. J. Bowen

1898 - 1980 (82 years)

Edmund John Bowen FRS was a British physical chemist. Early life and wartime career E. J. Bowen was the eldest of four born to Edmund Riley Bowen and Lilias Bowen in 1898 in Worcester, England. He attended the Royal Grammar School Worcester.

#6008

T. R. Seshadri

1900 - 1975 (75 years)

Thiruvengadam Rajendram Seshadri FNA, FRS was an Indian chemist, academic, writer and the Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Delhi, known for his researches on the Indian medicinal and other plants. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, UK and an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Besides several articles, he also published two books, Chemistry of Vitamins and Hormones and Advancement of Scientific and Religious Culture in India. The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 1963, for his contribu...

#6009

Charles R. Hauser

1900 - 1970 (70 years)

Charles Roy Hauser was an American chemist. Hauser was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a professor of chemistry at Duke University. Notable work The Sommelet–Hauser rearrangement is a named reaction based on the work of Hauser and Sommelet involving the rearrangement of certain benzyl quaternary ammonium salts. The reagent is sodium amide or another alkali metal amide and the reaction product a N,N-dialkylbenzylamine with a new alkyl group in the aromatic ortho position. For example, benzyltrimethylammonium iodide, [N3]I, rearranges in the presence of sodium amide to yield t...

#6010

Takeru Higuchi

1918 - 1987 (69 years)

Takeru Higuchi was an American chemist who was widely known as "the father of physical pharmacy". He invented the time-release medication capsule, which would release medicine slowly into the bloodstream.

#6011

Stephen Brunauer

1903 - 1986 (83 years)

Stephen Brunauer was an American research chemist, government scientist, and university teacher. He resigned from his position with the U.S. Navy during the McCarthy era, when he found it impossible to refute anonymous charges that he was disloyal to the U.S.

#6012

William Draper Harkins

1873 - 1951 (78 years)

William Draper Harkins was an American physical chemist, noted for his contributions to surface chemistry and nuclear chemistry. Harkins researched the structure of the atomic nucleus and was the first to propose the principle of nuclear fusion, four years before Jean Baptiste Perrin published his theory in 1919-20. His findings enabled, among other things, the development of the H-bomb. As a visiting professor with Fritz Haber in 1909, he was introduced to the study of surface tension, and he began work on the theory of solutions and solubility during a visit to MIT in 1909-1910.

#6013

Lars Onsager

1903 - 1976 (73 years)

Lars Onsager was an American physical chemist and theoretical physicist. He held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968.

#6014

Paul Hugh Emmett

Paul Hugh Emmett

1900 - 1985 (85 years)

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

#6015

Harold Urey

1893 - 1981 (88 years)

Harold Clayton Urey was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, as well as contributing to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.

#6016

Francis William Bergstrom

1897 - 1946 (49 years)

Francis William Bergstrom, Ph.D. was an American professor of chemistry at Stanford University. Bergstrom was born in Bloomington, Indiana on January 10, 1897, then moved to Stanford when he was 11 years old. He enrolled at Stanford and received a B.S. in 1918 and a Ph.D. in 1922, working with Edward Curtis Franklin. His postdoctoral work was undertaken at Clark University and Brown University, working with Charles A. Kraus. His independent career lasted 29 years at Stanford, during which time he wrote 70 peer-reviewed papers on nitrogen chemistry and served as an Associate Editor for The Jou...

#6017

David A. Frank-Kamenetskii

David A. Frank-Kamenetskii

1910 - 1970 (60 years)

David Albertovich Frank-Kamenetskii was a Soviet theoretical physicist and chemist, professor and doctor of physical, chemical and mathematical sciences. He developed the thermal explosion theory, worked on plasma physics problems and in astrophysics.

#6018

Morris Sugden

1919 - 1984 (65 years)

Sir Theodore Morris Sugden FRS, was a British chemist who specialised in combustion research. Biography Theodore Morris Sugden was born in the village of Triangle, the only child of Florence and Frederick Morris Sugden, a clerk in a mill. After attending Sowerby Bridge and District Secondary School he gained an open scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1938, where he read chemistry and was awarded a First in 1940. That year he began research under physicist W C Price on the measurement of precise ionization potentials of molecules. He later switched to working with R G W Norrish for ...

#6019

Gregory P. Baxter

1876 - 1953 (77 years)

Gregory Paul Baxter was an American chemist notable for his work on atomic weights. Biography Born in Somerville, Massachusetts, Baxter became an instructor in chemistry at Harvard in 1897. Dr Baxter served as chairman of the Harvard Chemistry Department from 1911 to 1932. In 1925 he assumed the Theodore William Richards Professorship, which he held until his retirement in 1944.

#6020

Hans Meerwein

1879 - 1965 (86 years)

Hans Meerwein was a German chemist. Several reactions and reagents bear his name, most notably the Meerwein–Ponndorf–Verley reduction, the Wagner–Meerwein rearrangement, the Meerwein arylation reaction, and Meerwein's salt.

#6021

Warren L. McCabe

1899 - 1982 (83 years)

Warren Lee McCabe was an American Physical Chemist and is considered as one of the founding fathers of the profession of chemical engineering. He is widely known for the eponymous McCabe–Thiele method for analysis of distillation processes and his book, Unit Operations of Chemical Engineering, a major textbook.

#6022

John Masson Gulland

John Masson Gulland

1898 - 1947 (49 years)

John Masson Gulland was a Scottish chemist and biochemist. His main work was on nucleic acids, morphine and aporphine alkaloids. His work at University College Nottingham on electrometric titration was important in leading to the discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick, and he was described as "a great nucleic acid chemist." He established the Scottish Seaweed Research Association and the Lace Research Council.

#6023

Shirō Akabori

1900 - 1992 (92 years)

Shirō Akabori , 20 October 1900 – 3 November 1992 in Chihama, Ogasa , was a Japanese chemist and university professor, known for the Akabori amino-acid reactions. Life and education After graduating from public school, he began training as a pharmacist at Chiba medical school, now Chiba University, in 1918. After graduating in 1921, he joined the pharmaceutical company Momotani Juntenkan. The company hired him as an assistant to the chemist Nishizawa Yūshichi of the Imperial University of Tokyo, where he was taught by Ikeda Kikunae. In the summer of the same year, he followed Nishizawa for a short stay at the Tohoku Imperial University to learn organic chemistry from Majima Rikō.

#6024

Edward Curtis Franklin

1862 - 1937 (75 years)

Edward Curtis Franklin was an American chemist. Biography Edward Franklin was born in Geary County, Kansas. He entered the University of Kansas at the age of 22, obtaining his major in chemistry in 1888. Two years later he decided to study at the University of Berlin for one year, but abandon it by 1891. In 1892 he came back to State University where he remained till 1893 working as assistant chemist. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University where he received his doctorate in chemistry a year later. He then came back to University of Kansas where he spent one year as a chemist while the rest of the years he was an associate professor there.

#6025

Samuel Cate Prescott

1872 - 1962 (90 years)

Samuel Cate Prescott was an American food scientist and microbiologist who was involved in the development of food safety, food science, public health, and industrial microbiology. Early life Prescott was born in South Hampton, New Hampshire, the younger of two children. An older sister, Grace, later became a teacher in South Hampton, located near the Amesbury, Massachusetts area, located across the New Hampshire-Massachusetts state line. His formal education was in an ungraded schoolhouse in New Hampshire. During his fifteenth year, Prescott served as a "rod man" on a surveying crew to lay o...

#6026

Mary Elvira Weeks

1892 - 1975 (83 years)

Mary Elvira Weeks was an American chemist and historian of science. Weeks was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Kansas and the first woman to be a faculty member there.

#6027

Nathaniel Oglesby Calloway

1907 - 1979 (72 years)

Nathaniel Oglesby Calloway was an American chemist and physician. Calloway was the first African American to receive an academic doctorate from an institute west of the Mississippi River and the first African American to receive a PhD in chemistry from Iowa State University .

#6028

Arthur Roderick Collar

1908 - 1986 (78 years)

Arthur Roderick Collar CBE FRS FREng was an English scientist and engineer who made significant contributions in the areas of aeroelasticity, matrix theory and its applications in engineering dynamics.

#6029

Gopinath Kartha

1927 - 1984 (57 years)

Gopinath Kartha was a prominent crystallographer of Indian origin. In 1967, he determined the molecular structure of the enzyme ribonuclease. This was the first protein structure elucidated and published in the United States.

#6030

Chi Che Wang

1894 - 1979 (85 years)

Chi Che Wang , also known as Wang Chi-Lian, was a Chinese biochemist and college professor. Wang was one of the first Chinese women to make a career in American higher education and scientific research.

#6031

Jakob Meisenheimer

Jakob Meisenheimer

1876 - 1934 (58 years)

Jakob Meisenheimer was a German chemist. He made numerous contributions to organic chemistry, the most famous being his proposed structure for a group of compounds now named Meisenheimer complex. He also proposed the mechanism of the Beckmann rearrangement. Later in his career, he reported the synthesis of the pyridine-N-oxide.

#6032

R. Norris Shreve

1885 - 1975 (90 years)

Randolph Norris Shreve was a chemical engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, educator and collector. After joining the Purdue University faculty in 1930, he helped to build the university's School of Chemical Engineering, the Purdue-Taiwan Engineering Project, and National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. He and his wife Eleanor are the namesakes of the Shreve Professorship of Organic Technology and Shreve Residence Hall at Purdue, and Shreve Hall on the Cheng Kung University campus. He is the namesake of the Norris Shreve Award for Outstanding Teaching in Chemical Engineering.

#6033

Richard H. Wilhelm

1909 - 1968 (59 years)

Richard Herman Wilhelm was an American chemical engineer notable for developing a new method of fluid separation called chemical parametric pumping. Wilhelm was also notable for pioneering in the development of fluid beds, which according to Princeton University "revolutionized the petroleum-cracking process". Princeton University established Wilhelm Lectures in his honor. Wilhelm was a member of the National Academy of Engineering Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a chairman of the department of chemical engineering at Princeton University. Princeton University cal...

#6034

Andreas von Antropoff

1878 - 1956 (78 years)

Andreas von Antropoff — Russian and German scientist-chemist, professor at the Bonn University and is known to have coined the term "neutronium" and developed a temporarily and widely used alternative periodic table of elements in 1926.

#6035

Ray Crist

1900 - 2005 (105 years)

Ray Crist was an American chemist who participated in the Manhattan Project. When he retired from teaching at the age of 104 in 2004, Crist is widely believed to have been America's oldest worker at the time.

#6036

Ida Noddack

1896 - 1978 (82 years)

Ida Noddack , née Tacke, was a German chemist and physicist. In 1934 she was the first to mention the idea later named nuclear fission. With her husband Walter Noddack, and Otto Berg, she discovered element 75, rhenium. She was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

#6037

Robert Whytlaw-Gray

1877 - 1958 (81 years)

Robert H. Whytlaw-Gray, OBE, FRS was an English chemist, born in London. He studied at the University of Glasgow and University College London and was Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Leeds. He and William Ramsay isolated radon and studied its physical properties .

#6038

Arnold Beckman

1900 - 2004 (104 years)

Arnold Orville Beckman was an American chemist, inventor, investor, and philanthropist. While a professor at California Institute of Technology, he founded Beckman Instruments based on his 1934 invention of the pH meter, a device for measuring acidity , later considered to have "revolutionized the study of chemistry and biology". He also developed the DU spectrophotometer, "probably the most important instrument ever developed towards the advancement of bioscience". Beckman funded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first silicon transistor company in California, thus giving rise to Silicon Valley.

#6039

Eger V. Murphree

Eger V. Murphree

1898 - 1962 (64 years)

Eger Vaughan Murphree was an American chemist, best known for his co-invention of the process of fluid catalytic cracking. Biography Murphree was born on November 3, 1898, in Bayonne, New Jersey, moving as a child to Kentucky. He graduated from Kentucky University with degrees in chemistry and mathematics in 1920, and a master's degree in chemistry in 1921. Murphree played college football as Kentucky as a tackle and was captain of the 1920 Kentucky Wildcats football team.

#6040

Moddie Taylor

1912 - 1976 (64 years)

Moddie Daniel Taylor was an African American chemist who specialized in rare earth minerals. He was one of the African American scientists and technicians on the Manhattan Project from 1943 to 1945, working to develop the atomic bomb. For his work on the Manhattan Project, he was awarded a Certificate of Merit Medal for his contributions by Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson.

#6041

James Holmes Sturdivant

1906 - 1972 (66 years)

James Holmes Sturdivant was a chemist who worked for several years as the main research assistant to Linus Pauling at Caltech, starting in 1927. He co-authored some seminal papers with Pauling, and was co-advisor of Robert Eugene Rundle.

#6042

I. K. Taimni

1898 - 1978 (80 years)

I. K. Taimni was a professor of chemistry at the Allahabad University in India, and an influential scholar in the fields of Yoga and Indian philosophy. He was a leader of the Theosophical Society. Taimni authored a number of books on Eastern Philosophy, including a modern interpretation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.

#6043

Harold Ellingham

1897 - 1975 (78 years)

Harold Johann Thomas Ellingham, OBE, was a British physical chemist, best known for his Ellingham diagrams, which summarize a large amount of information concerning extractive metallurgy. Ellingham was born in Tottenham on 21 November 1897, the son of Thomas Robert Ellingham and Katherine Caroline Bauer.

#6044

William Gidley Emmett

1887 - 1985 (98 years)

William Gidley Emmett FRSE was a British industrial chemist, educationalist and academic author. In education he spoke out against traditional examination methods and developed a series of non-standard tests to assess IQ, now commonly appearing in standard IQ tests, and generally known as the Moray House Tests.

#6045

William P. Murphy

William P. Murphy

1892 - 1987 (95 years)

William Parry Murphy was an American physician who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George Richards Minot and George Hoyt Whipple for their combined work in devising and treating macrocytic anemia .

#6046

Arne Ölander

1902 - 1984 (82 years)

Gustav Arne Ölander was a Swedish chemist, known for his discovery of the shape-memory effect in metal alloys. He was the son of Gustaf Ölander and Hilda Ölander née Norrman. Ölander became an associate professor of physical chemistry at Stockholm University in 1929. He was a professor of theoretical chemistry and electrochemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology 1936–1943, in inorganic and physical chemistry at Stockholm University 1943–1960, and in physical chemistry at Stockholm University 1960–1968.

#6047

Paul Karrer

1889 - 1971 (82 years)

Professor Paul Karrer FRS FRSE FCS was a Swiss organic chemist best known for his research on vitamins. He and Norman Haworth won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1937. Biography Early years Karrer was born in Moscow, Russia to Paul Karrer and Julie Lerch, both Swiss nationals. In 1892 Karrer's family returned to Switzerland where he was educated at Wildegg and at the grammar school in Lenzburg, Aarau, where he matriculated in 1908. He studied chemistry at the University of Zurich under Alfred Werner and after gaining his Ph.D. in 1911, he spent a further year as assistant in the Chemical Institute.

#6048

Gordon Aylward

1900 - Present (126 years)

Gordon Hillis Aylward is an Australian chemical author. He is known for writing the SI Chemical Data book. Biography Aylward graduated on 20 May 1952 with a BSc in Applied Chemistry from the then-new University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Later he received a MSc from the same university, and continued to teach Analytical Chemistry for 13 years there. During that period he organized the Approach to Chemistry summer schools, together with his co-teacher dr Tristan Findlay. To support the course, they wrote the book SI Chemical Data as the textbook.

#6049

Frederick Mason Brewer

1903 - 1963 (60 years)

Frederick Mason Brewer CBE FRIC was an English chemist. He was Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford and Mayor of Oxford during 1959–60. Frederick Brewer was born in Kensal Rise , Middlesex, England. He was the son of Frederick Charles Brewer and Ellen Maria Owen, both school teachers. Brewer studied chemistry at Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1920, having received an open scholarship, and subsequently gained a first class degree. After his undergraduate studies, Brewer undertook research with Prof. Frederick Soddy.

#6050

Hans Stammreich

1902 - 1969 (67 years)

Hans Stammreich , was a Brazilian chemist of German origin and an important pioneer of Raman spectroscopy and molecular spectroscopy. Life After obtaining his PhD in physical chemistry after studying under Adolf Miethe at the Berlin Technical University, Stammreich became soon, partly influenced by his personal friendship with Albert Einstein, interested in molecular spectroscopy, especially Raman spectroscopy. After he was fired from TU Berlin in April 1933 because of his Jewish background, Stammreich emigrated to Paris, where he stayed until 1940, working in the labs of Paul Langevin and Ch...

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