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,
#6151
Adolf von Baeyer
1835 - 1917 (82 years)
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer was a German chemist who synthesised indigo and developed a nomenclature for cyclic compounds . He was ennobled in the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1885 and was the 1905 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Go to Profile#6152
Alexander Zarchin
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Alexander Zarchin was a Ukrainian-Israeli chemist and inventor. He is most noted for inventing a process of sea water desalination. Biography Born in Ukraine to a family of religious Zionists, as a young man, Zarchin studied industrial chemistry and specialized in metallurgy. In 1934, he was arrested by the authorities for the crime of Zionism and was sentenced to five years in prison. Zarchin was then recruited into the Red Army, and by the end of World War II, he managed to reach West Germany, and from there he immigrated to Palestine in the summer of 1947. Since his arrival and settlemen...
Go to Profile#6153
Petru Bogdan
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Petru Bogdan was a Romanian chemist, educator, and politician. In 1926, he was elected a titular member of the Romanian Academy. He was born in Cozmești, Iași County, the son of Vasile Bogdan and Ana, née Timuș; his father died four years laters, during the Romanian War of Independence of 1877.
Go to Profile#6154
Luigi Valentino Brugnatelli
1761 - 1818 (57 years)
Luigi Valentino Brugnatelli was an Italian chemist and inventor who discovered the process for electroplating in 1805. Early life Born in Pavia, he attended the Pharmacy School created by Count Karl Joseph von Firmian at the University of Pavia where he was a pupil of Giovanni Antonio Scopoli who urged him to practice the medical profession, which he did without neglecting his interests in chemistry. Brugnatelli graduated in medicine in 1784 with a thesis on the chemical analysis of gastric juices. He was also a pupil of Lazzaro Spallanzani.
Go to Profile#6155
Gheorghe Spacu
1883 - 1955 (72 years)
Gheorghe Spacu was a Romanian inorganic chemist. Born in Iași, he attended the city's National College from 1894 to 1901. He subsequently enrolled in the physics and chemistry section of the sciences faculty at the University of Iași. There, his professors included Petru Poni , Vasile Buțureanu , Anastasie Obregia and Dragomir Hurmuzescu . Upon graduating in 1905, he went to deepen his studies at the universities of University of Vienna and then Berlin. He returned in 1907, when he began working as an assistant in the inorganic chemistry laboratory of Neculai Costăchescu, and was promoted to head of operations in 1916.
Go to Profile#6156
Gottfried Christoph Beireis
1730 - 1809 (79 years)
Gottfried Christoph Beireis was a German chemist and doctor. He was also a collector of curiosities who rescued some of Jacques de Vaucanson's automata. Biography Beireis was born in Mühlhausen. He taught anatomy, medicine, surgery, chemistry, botany, natural history, pharmacy, mineralogy, metallurgy, agriculture, forestry, music, painting, and numismatics.
Go to Profile#6157
Felix Ehrlich
1877 - 1942 (65 years)
Felix Ehrlich was a German chemist and biochemist. Life and work Felix Ehrlich studied in Berlin and Munich. After receiving his doctorate in 1900, he worked at the Institute of Sugar Industry in Berlin. In 1906 he obtained his diploma in chemistry. From 1909 he worked as professor in Breslau, and later as director of the Institute on Biotechnology and Agriculture.
Go to Profile#6158
Reynold C. Fuson
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Reynold Clayton Fuson was an American chemist. Biography Born in Wakefield, Illinois, Fuson attended Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana, where after one year in 1914 he was certified as a teacher. He received a Bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Montana, a Master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#6159
Burckhardt Helferich
1887 - 1982 (95 years)
Burckhardt Helferich was a German chemist. Biography He was the son of surgery professor Heinrich Helferich . He studied science, especially Geology, at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and from 1907 chemistry in Munich and Berlin. In Berlin, Helferich was advised by Emil Fischer and later became his assistant.
Go to Profile#6160
Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren
1760 - 1798 (38 years)
Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren was a German chemist and a native of Bernburg. He began his career working in a pharmacy in Bernburg, and later worked as a pharmacist in Offenbach am Main and Erfurt. In 1782, he began his studies at the University of Helmstedt, and in 1788 became professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Halle.
Go to Profile#6161
Friedrich Knauer
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Knauer was a German physical chemist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club. Education From 1918 to 1924, Knauer studied at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and Leibniz University Hannover. He received his doctorate in engineering in 1923 at Hannover; he was a student of Beckmann and W. Kohlrausch.
Go to Profile#6162
Dorothy Hahn
1876 - 1950 (74 years)
Dorothy Anna Hahn was a lifelong educator and American professor of organic chemistry at Mount Holyoke College. She was most known for her research which utilized the then newly developed technique of ultraviolet spectroscopy to study hydantoins.
Go to Profile#6163
John Ferguson
1838 - 1916 (78 years)
John Ferguson FRSE LLD was a Scottish chemist and bibliographer. He is noted for the early alchemy and chemistry bibliography Bibliotheca chemica. He was generally nicknamed Soda Ferguson. The Ferguson Collection, a collection of 7,500 books and manuscripts from his personal library is held by the University of Glasgow.
Go to Profile#6164
Edward Divers
1837 - 1912 (75 years)
Edward Divers FRS was a British experimental chemist who rose to prominence despite being visually impaired from young age. Between 1873 and 1899, Divers lived and worked in Japan and significantly contributed to the science and education of that country.
Go to Profile#6165
Hans Leopold Meyer
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Hans Leopold Meyer was an Austrian chemist. He was the brother of Stefan Meyer who also received the Lieben Prize. Hans Leopold Meyer studied at the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, Vienna University of Technology and University of Heidelberg he received his PhD in 1894. He started as a lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology, and professor at the German University in Prague. He was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and he received the Lieben Prize in 1905, seven years before his younger brother Stefan Meyer received the prize in 1913. He was killed in...
Go to Profile#6166
Wiktor Kemula
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Wiktor Kemula was a Polish chemist, electrochemist, and polarographist. He greatly contributed to the development of electroanalytical chemistry, particularly polarography. He is known for developing the hanging mercury drop electrode .
Go to Profile#6167
Ejnar Hertzsprung
1873 - 1967 (94 years)
Ejnar Hertzsprung was a Danish chemist and astronomer. Career Hertzsprung was born in Frederiksberg, Denmark, the son of Severin and Henriette. He studied chemical engineering at Copenhagen Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1898. After spending two years working as a chemist in St. Petersburg, in 1901 he studied photochemistry at Leipzig University for a year. His father was an amateur astronomer, which led to Ejnar's interest in the subject. He began making astronomical observations in Fredericksberg in 1902, and within a few years had noticed that stars with similar spectral type could have widely different absolute magnitudes.
Go to Profile#6168
Guillaume-François Rouelle
1703 - 1770 (67 years)
Guillaume François Rouelle was a French chemist and apothecary. In 1754 he introduced the concept of a base into chemistry as a substance which reacts with an acid to form a salt. He is known as l'Aîné to distinguish him from his younger brother, Hilaire Rouelle, who was also a chemist and known as the discoverer of urea.
Go to Profile#6169
Alfred Berthoud
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Alfred Berthoud was a Swiss chemist, professor of chemistry at the University of Neuchâtel. In 1908 Berthoud became professor of physical chemistry at the University of Neuchâtel, though he continued teaching in secondary schools until he was appointed Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry at the University in 1925. In 1938 he was made President of the Swiss Chemical Society.
Go to Profile#6170
Oliver Wolcott Gibbs
1822 - 1908 (86 years)
Oliver Wolcott Gibbs was an American chemist. He is known for performing the first electrogravimetric analyses, namely the reductions of copper and nickel ions to their respective metals. Biography Oliver Wolcott Gibbs was born in New York City in 1822 to George and Laura Gibbs. His father, Colonel George Gibbs, was an ardent mineralogist; the mineral gibbsite was named after him, and his collection was finally bought by Yale College. Oliver was the younger brother of George Gibbs and older brother to Alfred Gibbs, who became a Union Army Brigadier General during the American Civil War. Al...
Go to Profile#6171
Edmund Oscar von Lippmann
1857 - 1940 (83 years)
Edmund Oscar von Lippmann was a German chemist and natural science historian. For his writings he was awarded a couple honoris causa doctorates from German universities, as well as the Leibniz Medal and the Sudhoff Medal.
Go to Profile#6172
Victor LaMer
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
Victor Kuhn LaMer or La Mer was an American chemist. He has been described as "the father of colloid chemistry". Early life and education LaMer was born in Leavenworth, Kansas on June 15, 1895. He was the son of Joseph Secondule LaMer and Anna Pauline Kuhn.
Go to Profile#6173
Marston T. Bogert
1868 - 1954 (86 years)
Marston Taylor Bogert was an American chemist. Biography He was born in Flushing, New York on April 18, 1868 and studied at the Flushing Institute, which was a well known private school, where he was a straight-A student.
Go to Profile#6174
Alexander Gutbier
1876 - 1926 (50 years)
Alexander Felix Maximilian Gutbier was a German professor of chemistry at the University of Jena. He made studies both in organic and inorganic chemistry but pioneered studies on the chemistry of colloid and organo-metallic complexes. Specializing mainly in experimental chemistry, he published several texts on organic chemistry.
Go to Profile#6175
Nikolai Prilezhaev
1877 - 1944 (67 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Prilezhaev, , was a Russian organic chemist. The Prilezhaev reaction, in which an alkene and a peroxyacid react to form an epoxide, is named after him. Prilezhaev was the son of a clergyman and studied chemistry at the Theological Seminary in Warsaw and then at the University of Warsaw under the supervision of Yegor Yegorovich Vagner . After graduating in 1900 he was assistant professor of organic chemistry at the Polytechnic in Warsaw where he belonged to the school of organic chemistry founded by Wagner. After earning a master's degree in 1912 in St. Petersburg, he became associate professor of organic chemistry at the University of Warsaw.
Go to Profile#6176
Wilbur Olin Atwater
1844 - 1907 (63 years)
Wilbur Olin Atwater was an American chemist known for his studies of human nutrition and metabolism, and is considered the father of modern nutrition research and education. He is credited with developing the Atwater system, which laid the groundwork for nutrition science in the United States and inspired modern Olympic nutrition.
Go to Profile#6177
Melvin Lorrel Nichols
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Melvin Lorrel "Pete" Nichols was an American chemistry professor and author. Early life Nichols was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of Joseph Wiseman Nichols, a cabinetmaker, and Sarah Rebecca Heidelbaugh. He was the youngest of six children.
Go to Profile#6178
Albert James Bernays
1823 - 1892 (69 years)
Albert James Bernays was a British chemist. He was the son of Dr. Adolphus Bernays , modern languages Professor at King's College, London. Life Bernays was educated at King's College School, and studied chemistry with C. Remigius Fresenius, and afterwards, with Justus Liebig at Giessen, where he graduated PhD. His doctoral thesis was probably a paper on limonin, a bitter principle which he discovered in the pips of oranges and lemons . In 1845, he began his career as an analyst and lecturer on chemistry in Derby, and became known for his interest in questions concerning food and hygiene. In 1851, he served as a juror at the Great Exhibition.
Go to Profile#6179
Charles Daubeny
1795 - 1867 (72 years)
Charles Giles Bridle Daubeny was an English chemist, botanist and geologist. Education Daubeny was born at Stratton near Cirencester in Gloucestershire, the son of the Rev. James Daubeny. He went to Winchester College in 1808, and in 1810 was elected to a demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford, under Dr. John Kidd. From 1815 to 1818 he studied medicine in London and Edinburgh, in the latter also studying geology under Prof Robert Jameson. He took his M.D. degree at Oxford, and was a fellow of the College of Physicians.
Go to Profile#6180
Anders Gustaf Ekeberg
1767 - 1813 (46 years)
Anders Gustaf Ekeberg was a Swedish analytical chemist who discovered tantalum in 1802. He was notably deaf. Education Anders Gustav Ekeberg was a Swedish scientist, mathematician and expert in Greek literature. His father, Joseph Erik Ekeberg, was a shipbuilder. His uncle was Carl Gustaf Ekeberg.
Go to Profile#6181
Nikolai Trifonov
1891 - 1958 (67 years)
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Trifonov was a Soviet chemist and founder of the Scientific School of Chemistry. His expertise primarily consisted of the physical and chemical analysis of concentrated solutions.
Go to Profile#6182
Anastasios Christomanos
1841 - 1906 (65 years)
Anastasios Christomanos was one of the most important Greek scientists of the later part of the 19th century. His academic collaborators were some of the most important scientists in the world, including Robert Bunsen, Georg Ludwig Carius, Emil Erlenmeyer and Gustav Kirchhoff. He is the father of modern Greek chemical education. He wrote 73 books and dissertations. His fields of study included: Inorganic Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, and Analytical Chemistry. He helped restructure Greek education. Greek education was in the grasp of Korydalism for over 300 years. With the onset of the in...
Go to Profile#6183
Ernst Gottfried Fischer
1756 - 1831 (75 years)
Ernst Gottfried Fischer was a German chemist. He was born in Hoheneiche near Saalfeld. After studying theology and mathematics at the University of Halle, he was a teacher in Berlin before becoming Professor of Physics in 1810. He translated Claude Berthollet's publication Recherches sur les lois de l'affinitié in 1802. He proposed a system of equivalents based on sulfuric acid equal to one hundred.
Go to Profile#6184
Isaac Mustafin
1908 - 1968 (60 years)
Isaac Mustafin was a Soviet chemist and a doctor of chemical sciences. Dr. Mustafin headed the faculty of analytical chemistry at Saratov State University from 1955. All his life was connected to the Saratov State University: his only lengthy absence from his work place took place from June 23, 1941 to August 15, 1945, when he served in the army. The life and activity of Professor Mustafin were reflected in a number of papers [1–7] and even monographs [8–9], including that in the series of scientific biographic literature of the Nauka publishing house [8]. . The unusual biography and diversi...
Go to Profile#6185
Mikhail Usanovich
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Michail Illyich Usanovich was a Russian/Soviet physical chemist, and an academician of the Academy of Sciences of Kazakh SSR since 1962. He is famous for his generalized acid-base theory. Michail Usanovich was born to a Jewish doctor's family in Zhytomyr.
Go to Profile#6186
Theodor Wertheim
1820 - 1864 (44 years)
Theodor Wertheim was an Austrian chemist born in Vienna. He was the father of gynecologist Ernst Wertheim . He studied organic chemistry in Berlin as a pupil of Eilhard Mitscherlich, and in 1843 travelled to the University of Prague, where he studied under Josef Redtenbacher. He served as privatdozent in Vienna, and from 1853 to 1860, was a professor at the University of Pest. From 1861 onward, he was a professor at the University of Graz. In May 1864, he moved back to Vienna, where he died soon afterwards.
Go to Profile#6187
Ernst Späth
1886 - 1946 (60 years)
Ernst Späth was an Austrian chemist, specializing in natural products. Life Späth was the first to synthesise mescaline and was one of the first to synthesize cuscohygrine on a small scale with Hans Tuppy.
Go to Profile#6188
Theodor Weyl
1851 - 1913 (62 years)
Theodor Weyl was a German chemist and hygienist born in Berlin. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin and Strasbourg, earning his doctorate in 1872 with a dissertation on animal and plant proteins. Following graduation he worked as an assistant in the physiology laboratory at Berlin, shortly afterwards becoming an assistant professor at the University of Erlangen. During his tenure at Erlangen he spent the winter of 1880–81 performing research on the electric organs of rays at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples.
Go to Profile#6189
Adolf Ferdinand Weinhold
1841 - 1917 (76 years)
Adolf Ferdinand Weinhold was a German chemist, physician and inventor. Life From 1857 to 1861 Weinhold studied chemistry and physics at universities in Göttingen and in Leipzig. His mentors were Otto Linné Erdmann and Friedrich Wöhler. In Germany, Weinhold worked after university studies as chemist and physician. He was appointed professor at Chemnitz University of Technology in 1870. In 1873 he was granted a D. Phil from the University of Leipzig.
Go to Profile#6190
Arthur Rosenheim
1865 - 1942 (77 years)
Arthur Rosenheim was a German chemist. His main work was on heteropolymetalate, colloids and complex ion chemistry. Rosenheim was born in New York to banker William and his wife Maria Hallgarten. He grew up in Berlin from 1873 and graduated from the Wilhelms-Gymnasium in 1884. He went to the University of Heidelberg and later the Universities at Munich and Berlin. He studied under Carl Rammelsberg, receiving a doctorate in 1888 with a dissertation on vanadium tungstic acid. After some studies on electrochemistry at Munich he became an assistant at the Chemical Institute in Berlin. He then founded a private laboratory with Carl Friedheim, and later worked with Richard Joseph Meyer.
Go to Profile#6191
Leon Marchlewski
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Leon Paweł Teodor Marchlewski was a Polish chemist and an Honorary Member of the Polish Chemical Society. He was one of the founders in the field of chlorophyll chemistry. The illustration on the right is of his diplomatic passport he used in 1927 to attend an international conference on chemistry in Paris.
Go to Profile#6192
Rudolf Schmitt
1830 - 1898 (68 years)
Rudolf Schmitt was a German chemist who together with Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe discovered the Kolbe-Schmitt reaction. Biography Schmitt was born in the small village Wippershain in the Hesse-Kassel as the second of eight siblings as son of a preacher. He moved several times during his childhood and entered the Gymnasium as boarding pupil in Marburg. He received his Abitur in 1853 and entered the University of Marburg the same year. He started studying mathematics, theology and chemistry, but later concentrated on chemistry. After 8 Semesters he joined Hermann Fehling at the University of ...
Go to Profile#6193
Georges Urbain
1872 - 1938 (66 years)
Georges Urbain was a French chemist, a professor of the Sorbonne, a member of the Institut de France, and director of the Institute of Chemistry in Paris. Much of his work focused on the rare earths, isolating and separating elements such as europium and gadolinium, and studying their spectra, their magnetic properties and their atomic masses. He discovered the element lutetium . He also studied the efflorescence of saline hydrates.
Go to Profile#6194
Niels Bjerrum
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Niels Janniksen Bjerrum was a Danish chemist. Niels Bjerrum was the son of ophthalmologist Jannik Petersen Bjerrum, and started to study at the University of Copenhagen in 1897. He received his Master's degree in 1902 and his Doctor's degree in 1908, and did research in coordination complex chemistry under Sophus Mads Jørgensen. He became a docent in 1912, and in 1914 he became a professor of chemistry at the Royal Agricultural College in Copenhagen, as successor of Odin Tidemand Christensen. He stayed on this post until his retirement in 1949, and from 1939 to 1946 he was also the Director ...
Go to Profile#6195
Eben Norton Horsford
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Eben Norton Horsford was an American scientist who taught agricultural chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard from 1847 to 1863. Later he was known for his reformulation of baking powder, his interest in Viking settlements in North America, and the monuments he built to Leif Erikson.
Go to Profile#6196
Józef Boguski
1853 - 1933 (80 years)
Józef Jerzy Boguski was a Polish chemist and a professor at the Warsaw Polytechnic. Life Boguski had served as an assistant in St. Petersburg to the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. From 1895 Boguski was a professor at Warsaw's Wawelberg and Rotwand School, and from 1920 at the Warsaw Polytechnic.
Go to Profile#6197
Richard Wolffenstein
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
Richard Wolffenstein was a German chemist. He discovered acetone peroxide in 1895 by reacting acetone with hydrogen peroxide. The Wolffenstein-Böters reaction, which he discovered in 1913, was an alternative production method for explosives.
Go to Profile#6198
Charles Prévost
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Charles Prévost was a French chemist. He was born on 20 March 1899 at Champlitte, Haute-Saône and died in 1983. Biography Prévost was the son of Georges Prévost and Marie Zimmermann . He married Eléonore Fumée , with whom he had two children. After studying at Lycée Louis-le-Grand he was a student from 1919 to 1923 at the École Normale Supérieure and at the University of Paris. In 1923 he entered the agrégation in physical sciences and spent six years as an assistant at the École Navale. In 1928 he received his doctorate in physical sciences. From 1929 to 1933 he was a lecturer in Nancy, then becoming a professor of chemistry; from 1936 to 1937 he was a professor at Lille.
Go to Profile#6199
Ladislaus Farkas
1904 - 1948 (44 years)
Ladislaus Farkas is an Israeli chemist, of Austro-Hungarian origin, was the founder of the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Education and career Farkas was born in Dunajská Streda, Slovakia as the son of a pharmacist. In 1908, the family moved to Nagyvárad in Transylvania , where his father ran a pharmacy. The family attends a synagogue affiliated with Neolog Judaism. Farkas studied at the Gymnasium in Oradea, then spent two years at the Technical University of Vienna. He continued his studies in Berlin where he entered the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in 1924.
Go to Profile#6200
Martha Doan
1872 - 1960 (88 years)
Martha Doan was an American chemist whose contributions include research in compounds of thallium, three published work, and tenure as a professor and dean at various institutions in the US. Throughout her lifetime she received four degrees, a B.S. and master's from Purdue, a B.L. from Earlham College, and a Sc.D. from Cornell. She was a dean of women for two colleges, Earlham College and Iowa Wesleyan College. In addition to her involvement in higher education, she was involved with several national organizations that involved chemistry and science. She was awarded a certificate for Outstanding Service to Science in 1951.
Go to Profile