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).
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.
List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#6051
Michael Polanyi
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing.
Go to Profile#6052
Prafulla Chandra Ray
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Sir Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, CIE, FNI, FRASB, FIAS, FCS was an Indian chemist, educationist, historian, industrialist and philanthropist. He established the first modern Indian research school in chemistry and is regarded as the Father of Indian Chemistry.
Go to Profile#6053
Hermann Kolbe
1818 - 1884 (66 years)
Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe was a major contributor to the birth of modern organic chemistry. He was a professor at Marburg and Leipzig. Kolbe was the first to apply the term synthesis in a chemical context, and contributed to the philosophical demise of vitalism through synthesis of the organic substance acetic acid from carbon disulfide, and also contributed to the development of structural theory. This was done via modifications to the idea of "radicals" and accurate prediction of the existence of secondary and tertiary alcohols, and to the emerging array of organic reactions through his ...
Go to Profile#6054
James Crafts
1839 - 1917 (78 years)
James Mason Crafts was an American chemist, mostly known for developing the Friedel–Crafts alkylation and acylation reactions with Charles Friedel in 1876. Biography James Crafts, the son of Royal Altamont Crafts and Marianne Mason , was born in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard University in 1858. Although he never received his Ph.D., he studied chemistry in Germany at the Academy of Mines of Freiberg, and served as an assistant to Robert Bunsen at Heidelberg, and then with Wurtz in Paris .
Go to Profile#6055
Joseph Black
1728 - 1799 (71 years)
Joseph Black was a Scottish physicist and chemist, known for his discoveries of magnesium, latent heat, specific heat, and carbon dioxide. He was Professor of Anatomy and Chemistry at the University of Glasgow for 10 years from 1756, and then Professor of Medicine and Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh from 1766, teaching and lecturing there for more than 30 years.
Go to Profile#6056
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
1778 - 1850 (72 years)
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for his discovery that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen by volume , for two laws related to gases, and for his work on alcohol–water mixtures, which led to the degrees Gay-Lussac used to measure alcoholic beverages in many countries.
Go to Profile#6057
Alfred Nobel
1833 - 1896 (63 years)
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist. He is known for inventing dynamite as well as having bequeathed his fortune to establish the Nobel Prize. He also made several important contributions to science, holding 355 patents in his lifetime. Nobel's most famous invention was dynamite, an explosive using nitroglycerin; it was patented in 1867.
Go to Profile#6058
Viktor Meyer
1848 - 1897 (49 years)
Viktor Meyer was a German chemist and significant contributor to both organic and inorganic chemistry. He is best known for inventing an apparatus for determining vapour densities, the Viktor Meyer apparatus, and for discovering thiophene, a heterocyclic compound. He is sometimes referred to as Victor Meyer, a name used in some of his publications.
Go to Profile#6059
Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch was a German chemist. Life and work Hantzsch studied chemistry in Dresden and graduated at the University of Würzburg under Johannes Wislicenus. As a professor, he taught at the Universities of Zürich, Würzburg und Leipzig.
Go to Profile#6060
Amedeo Avogadro
1776 - 1856 (80 years)
Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro, Count of Quaregna and Cerreto was an Italian scientist, most noted for his contribution to molecular theory now known as Avogadro's law, which states that equal volumes of gases under the same conditions of temperature and pressure will contain equal numbers of molecules. In tribute to him, the ratio of the number of elementary entities in a substance to its amount of substance , , is known as the Avogadro constant. This constant is denoted NA, and is one of the seven defining constants of the SI.
Go to Profile#6061
Jaroslav Heyrovský
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
Jaroslav Heyrovský was a Czech chemist and inventor. Heyrovský was the inventor of the polarographic method, father of the electroanalytical method, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1959 for his invention and development of the polarographic methods of analysis. His main field of work was polarography.
Go to Profile#6062
Edward Frankland
1825 - 1899 (74 years)
Sir Edward Frankland, was an English chemist. He was one of the originators of organometallic chemistry and introduced the concept of combining power or valence. An expert in water quality and analysis, he was a member of the second royal commission on the pollution of rivers, and studied London's water quality for decades. He also studied luminous flames and the effects of atmospheric pressure on dense ignited gas, and was one of the discoverers of helium.
Go to Profile#6063
Alessandro Volta
1745 - 1827 (82 years)
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian physicist and chemist who was a pioneer of electricity and power and is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the president of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta's invention sparked a great amount of scientific excitement an...
Go to Profile#6064
Carl Wilhelm Scheele
1742 - 1786 (44 years)
Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a Swedish German pharmaceutical chemist. Scheele discovered oxygen , and identified molybdenum, tungsten, barium, hydrogen, and chlorine, among others. Scheele discovered organic acids tartaric, oxalic, uric, lactic, and citric, as well as hydrofluoric, hydrocyanic, and arsenic acids. He preferred speaking German to Swedish his whole life, as German was commonly spoken among Swedish pharmacists.
Go to Profile#6065
Carl Remigius Fresenius
1818 - 1897 (79 years)
Carl Remigius Fresenius , was a German chemist, known for his studies in analytical chemistry. Biography Fresenius was born on 28 December 1818, in Frankfurt, Germany. After working for some time for a pharmacy in his native town, he entered Bonn University in 1840, and a year later migrated to Gießen, where he acted as assistant in Liebig's laboratory, and in 1843, became an assistant professor.
Go to Profile#6066
Richard Willstätter
1872 - 1942 (70 years)
Richard Martin Willstätter FRS HFRSE was a German organic chemist whose study of the structure of plant pigments, chlorophyll included, won him the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Willstätter invented paper chromatography following the initial description of the separation technique by Mikhail Tsvet.
Go to Profile#6067
Clemens Winkler
1838 - 1904 (66 years)
Clemens Alexander Winkler was a German chemist who discovered the element germanium in 1886, solidifying Dmitri Mendeleev's theory of periodicity. Life Winkler was born in 1838 in Freiberg, Kingdom of Saxony the son of a chemist who had studied under Berzelius. Winkler's early education was at schools in Freiberg, Dresden, and Chemnitz. In 1857 he entered the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, where his knowledge of analytical chemistry surpassed what he was being taught there. Sixteen years later, Winkler was appointed a professor of chemical technology and analytical chemistry ...
Go to Profile#6068
Leopold Gmelin
1788 - 1853 (65 years)
Leopold Gmelin was a German chemist. Gmelin was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. He worked on the red prussiate and created Gmelin's test, and wrote his Handbook of Chemistry, which over successive editions became a standard reference work still in use.
Go to Profile#6069
Victor Grignard
1871 - 1935 (64 years)
Francois Auguste Victor Grignard was a French chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the eponymously named Grignard reagent and Grignard reaction, both of which are important in the formation of carbon–carbon bonds.
Go to Profile#6070
Rainer Ludwig Claisen
1851 - 1930 (79 years)
Rainer Ludwig Claisen was a German chemist best known for his work with condensations of carbonyls and sigmatropic rearrangements. He was born in Cologne as the son of a jurist and studied chemistry at the university of Bonn , where he became a member of K.St.V. Arminia. He served in the army as a nurse in 1870–1871 and continued his studies at Göttingen University. He returned to the University of Bonn in 1872 and started his academic career at the same university in 1874. He died in 1930 in Godesberg am Rhein .
Go to Profile#6071
William Prout
1785 - 1850 (65 years)
William Prout FRS was an English chemist, physician, and natural theologian. He is remembered today mainly for what is called Prout's hypothesis. Biography Prout was born in Horton, Gloucestershire in 1785 and educated at 17 years of age by a clergyman, followed by the Redland Academy at Bristol and Edinburgh University, where he graduated in 1811 with an MD. His professional life was spent as a practising physician in London, but he also occupied himself with chemical research. He was an active worker in biological chemistry and carried out many analyses of the secretions of living organisms, which he believed were produced by the breakdown of bodily tissues.
Go to Profile#6072
Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac
1817 - 1894 (77 years)
Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac was a Swiss chemist whose work with atomic weights suggested the possibility of isotopes and the packing fraction of nuclei. His study of the rare earth elements led to his discovery of ytterbium in 1878 and co-discovery of gadolinium in 1880.
Go to Profile#6073
Odd Hassel
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Odd Hassel was a Norwegian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate. Biography Hassel was born in Kristiania , Norway. His parents were Ernst Hassel , a gynaecologist, and Mathilde Klaveness . In 1915, he entered the University of Oslo where he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry, and graduated in 1920. Victor Goldschmidt was Hassel's tutor when he began studies in Oslo, while Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt, Victor's father, was Hassel's thesis advisor. Father and son were important figures in Hassel's life and they remained friends. After taking a year off from studying, he went to Munich, Ger...
Go to Profile#6074
Theodor Curtius
1857 - 1928 (71 years)
Geheimrat Julius Wilhelm Theodor Curtius was professor of Chemistry at Heidelberg University and elsewhere. He published the Curtius rearrangement in 1890/1894 and also discovered diazoacetic acid, hydrazine and hydrazoic acid.In 1882 he carried out the first ever peptide synthesis, creating the N-protected dipeptide, benzoylglycylglycine
Go to Profile#6075
Antoine Jérôme Balard
1802 - 1876 (74 years)
Antoine Jérôme Balard was a French chemist and one of the discoverers of bromine Career Born at Montpellier, France, on 30 September 1802, he started as an apothecary, but taking up teaching he acted as chemical assistant at the faculty of sciences of his native town, and then became professor of chemistry at the royal college and school of pharmacy and at the faculty of sciences. In 1826 he discovered in seawater a substance which he recognized as a previously unknown element and named it bromine. It had been independently prepared by Carl Jacob Löwig the previous year and the two are both r...
Go to Profile#6076
Paul Walden
1863 - 1957 (94 years)
Paul Walden was a Russian, Latvian and German chemist known for his work in stereochemistry and history of chemistry. In particular, he discovered the Walden rule, he invented the stereochemical reaction known as Walden inversion and synthesized the first room-temperature ionic liquid, ethylammonium nitrate.
Go to Profile#6077
Leopold Ružička
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
Leopold Ružička was a Croatian-Swiss scientist and joint winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on polymethylenes and higher terpenes" "including the first chemical synthesis of male sex hormones." He worked most of his life in Switzerland, and received eight doctorates honoris causa in science, medicine, and law; seven prizes and medals; and twenty-four honorary memberships in chemical, biochemical, and other scientific societies.
Go to Profile#6078
John Lennard-Jones
1894 - 1954 (60 years)
Sir John Edward Lennard-Jones was a British mathematician and professor of theoretical physics at the University of Bristol, and then of theoretical science at the University of Cambridge. He was an important pioneer in the development of modern computational chemistry and theoretical chemistry.
Go to Profile#6079
Richard Adolf Zsigmondy
1865 - 1929 (64 years)
Richard Adolf Zsigmondy was an Austrian-born chemist. He was known for his research in colloids, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1925, as well as for co-inventing the slit-ultramicroscope, and different membrane filters. The crater Zsigmondy on the Moon is named in his honour.
Go to Profile#6080
Otto Diels
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Otto Paul Hermann Diels was a German chemist. His most notable work was done with Kurt Alder on the Diels–Alder reaction, a method for diene synthesis. The pair was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1950 for their work. Their method of synthesizing cyclic organic compounds proved valuable for the manufacture of synthetic rubber and plastic. He completed his education at the University of Berlin, where he later worked. Diels was employed at the University of Kiel when he completed his Nobel Prize–winning work, and remained there until he retired in 1945. Diels was married, with five children.
Go to Profile#6081
James Dewar
1842 - 1923 (81 years)
Sir James Dewar was a British chemist and physicist. He is best known for his invention of the vacuum flask, which he used in conjunction with research into the liquefaction of gases. He also studied atomic and molecular spectroscopy, working in these fields for more than 25 years.
Go to Profile#6082
Jabir ibn Hayyan
721 - 815 (94 years)
Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān , died 806−816, is the purported author of an enormous number and variety of works in Arabic, often called the Jabirian corpus. The works that survive today mainly deal with alchemy and chemistry, magic, and Shi'ite religious philosophy. However, the original scope of the corpus was vast and diverse, covering a wide range of topics ranging from cosmology, astronomy and astrology, over medicine, pharmacology, zoology and botany, to metaphysics, logic, and grammar.
Go to Profile#6083
Otto Ruff
1871 - 1939 (68 years)
Otto Ruff was a German chemist. Life Otto Ruff was born in Schwäbisch Hall, Württemberg. After becoming a pharmacist under the supervision of Carl Magnus von Hell at the University of Stuttgart he joined the group of Hermann Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin. Fischer was noted for his work on carbohydrates and so Ruff started his career as an organic chemist. In 1898 he published his work on the transformation of d-Glucose to d-Arabinose, later called the Ruff degradation.
Go to Profile#6084
Otto Wallach
1847 - 1931 (84 years)
Otto Wallach was a German chemist and recipient of the 1910 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on alicyclic compounds. Biography Wallach was born in Königsberg, the son of a Prussian civil servant. His father, Gerhard Wallach, descended from a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism. His mother, Otillie , was an ethnic German of Protestant religion. Wallach's father was transferred to Stettin and later to Potsdam. Otto Wallach went to school, a Gymnasium, in Potsdam, where he learned about literature and the history of art, two subjects he was interested his whole life. At this ti...
Go to Profile#6085
David Masson
1822 - 1907 (85 years)
David Mather Masson , was a Scottish academic, supporter of women's suffrage, literary critic and historian. Biography Masson was born in Aberdeen, the son of Sarah Mather and William Masson, a stone-cutter.
Go to Profile#6086
Gustave Chancel
1822 - 1890 (68 years)
Gustave Charles Bonaventure Chancel was a French chemist who conducted research on organic and analytical chemistry while also examining chemical aspects of wine making. A method for determining the fineness of ground sulphur involves the use of a calibrated tube sometimes called Chancel's Sulphurimeter.
Go to Profile#6087
Jaan Kalviste
1898 - 1936 (38 years)
Jaan Kalviste was an Estonian chemist, mineralogist, educator, and translator. Early life Jaan Kalviste was born Jaan Kranig on Mikko farm in the small village of Läste in present-day Lääne-Viru County to railway worker Ado Kranig and his wife Kadri . He was the second eldest of five siblings. He attended primary school in rural Lehtse Parish before studying at secondary school in Tallinn.
Go to Profile#6088
Sydney Young
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Sydney Young, FRS was an English chemist. He was born in Farnworth, in Widnes, Lancashire, the son of merchant Edward Young, JP of Liverpool. He was educated at a private school in Southport and the Liverpool Royal Institution school. In 1877, after two years working with his father, he entered Owens College, Manchester, to study chemistry. He was awarded B.Sc. in 1880 and the degree of D.Sc. three years later, while working with William Ramsay at University College, Bristol. There he was involved in the founding of the Chemical Society in 1880.
Go to Profile#6089
Adolf Joszt
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Adolf Joszt was a Polish chemist, considered to be a significant precursor to the practices of biotechnology and environmental protection.
Go to Profile#6090
Hugh Alistair Reid
#6091
June Sutor
1929 - 1990 (61 years)
Dorothy June Sutor was a New Zealand-born crystallographer who spent most of her research career in England. She was one of the first scientists to establish that hydrogen bonds could form to hydrogen atoms bonded to carbon atoms. She later worked in the laboratory of Kathleen Lonsdale on the characterisation and prevention of urinary calculi.
Go to Profile#6092
Ernst Anton Wülfing
1860 - 1930 (70 years)
Ernst Anton Wülfing was a German mineralogist and petrographer, known for his research on the optical properties of minerals and meteorites. He studied chemistry at Geneva and at Heidelberg as a student of Robert Bunsen, then focused his attention to mineralogy and geology, of which, he studied at Greifswald and Vienna . Afterwards he served as an assistant to Harry Rosenbusch at the University of Heidelberg.
Go to Profile#6093
Katherine Alice Burke
1875 - 1924 (49 years)
Katherine Alice Burke was a British chemist and one of the nineteen signatories of the 1904 petition to the Chemical Society. Early life and education Burke was born in Surrey in 1875. She obtained her BSc. degree from her studies at Bedford College and later Birkbeck, University of London. She graduated in 1899.
Go to Profile#6094
María Orosa
1893 - 1945 (52 years)
María Orosa e Ylagan was a Filipina food technologist, pharmaceutical chemist, humanitarian, and war heroine. She experimented with foods native to the Philippines, and during World War II developed Soyalac and Darak , which she also helped smuggle into Japanese-run internment camps that helped save the lives of thousands of Filipinos, Americans, and other nationals. She introduced to the public the well-known banana ketchup.
Go to Profile#6095
John Eddowes Bowman the Younger
1819 - 1854 (35 years)
John Eddowes Bowman the Younger was an English chemist. Life Bowman was the son of John Eddowes Bowman the elder, and brother of Sir William Bowman, physiologist and oculist, born at Welchpool on 7 July 1819. He was a pupil of John Frederic Daniell at King's College, London, and in 1845 succeeded William Allen Miller as demonstrator of chemistry there; he became subsequently, in 1851, the first professor of practical chemistry there. He was one of the founders of the Chemical Society of London. He died on 10 February 1854.
Go to Profile#6096
Werner Rolfinck
1599 - 1673 (74 years)
Werner Rolfinck was a German physician, scientist and botanist. He was a medical student in Leiden, Oxford, Paris, and Padua. Biography Rolfinck earned his master's degree at the University of Wittenberg under Daniel Sennert, and his medical doctorate in 1625 at the University of Padua under the guidance of Adriaan van den Spiegel.
Go to Profile#6097
Semyon Volfkovich
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Semyon Isaakovich Volfkovich was an outstanding Soviet chemist, inorganic chemist, technologist, Doctor of Chemical Sciences , member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union . He was engaged in the technology of production of mineral fertilizers, studied the processes of electrothermal sublimation of phosphorus. He developed an industrial scheme for producing potassium salts from sylvinite and a new technology for producing concentrated phosphate fertilizers. He was the first in the USSR to conduct research on fluoride gases uilization, to study the processes of processing mirabilite into soda and ammonium sulfate.
Go to Profile#6098
Charles Avery Doremus
1851 - 1925 (74 years)
Charles Avery Doremus was an American chemist. Early life and education Charles Avery Doremus was the son of chemist and physician Robert Ogden Doremus. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1870, and subsequently studied in the universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg, receiving the degree of Ph.D. from Heidelberg in 1872.
Go to Profile#6099
Kajetan Georg von Kaiser
1803 - 1871 (68 years)
Kajetan Georg von Kaiser was a German chemistry professor, researcher and inventor. Biography He was born at Kelheim on the Danube, in Bavaria, on 5 January 1803. He was appointed professor of technology at the University of Munich in 1851, and in 1868 became professor of applied chemistry at the Technical University Munich.
Go to Profile#6100
Ferdinand Reich
1799 - 1882 (83 years)
Ferdinand Reich was a German chemist who co-discovered indium in 1863 with Hieronymous Theodor Richter. Reich was born in Bernburg, Anhalt-Bernburg and died in Freiberg. He was color blind, or could only see in whites and blacks, and that is why Theodor Richter became his science partner. Richter would examine the colors produced in reactions that they studied.
Go to Profile