The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#6201
William Ramsay
1852 - 1916 (64 years)
Sir William Ramsay was a Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gases and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904 "in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air" along with his collaborator, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics that same year for their discovery of argon. After the two men identified argon, Ramsay investigated other atmospheric gases. His work in isolating argon, helium, neon, krypton, and xenon led to the development of a new section of the periodic table.
Go to Profile#6202
Richard Abegg
1869 - 1910 (41 years)
Richard Wilhelm Heinrich Abegg was a German chemist and pioneer of valence theory. He proposed that the difference of the maximum positive and negative valence of an element tends to be eight. This has come to be known as Abegg's rule. He was a gas balloon enthusiast, which caused his death at the age of 41 when he crashed in his balloon in Silesia.
Go to Profile#6203
Jean-Baptiste Dumas
1800 - 1884 (84 years)
Jean Baptiste André Dumas was a French chemist, best known for his works on organic analysis and synthesis, as well as the determination of atomic weights and molecular weights by measuring vapor densities. He also developed a method for the analysis of nitrogen in compounds.
Go to Profile#6204
Joseph Priestley
1733 - 1804 (71 years)
Joseph Priestley was an English chemist, natural philosopher, separatist theologian, grammarian, multi-subject educator, and liberal political theorist. He published over 150 works, and conducted experiments in several areas of science.
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Humphry Davy
1778 - 1829 (51 years)
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet, was a British chemist and inventor who invented the Davy lamp and a very early form of arc lamp. He is also remembered for isolating, by using electricity, several elements for the first time: potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron the following year, as well as for discovering the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. Davy also studied the forces involved in these separations, inventing the new field of electrochemistry. Davy is also credited to have been the first to discover clathrate hydrates in his lab.
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Robert Boyle
1627 - 1691 (64 years)
Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, alchemist and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry. He was a devout and pi...
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Ronald George Wreyford Norrish
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Ronald George Wreyford Norrish FRS was a British chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967. Education and early life Norrish was born in Cambridge and was educated at The Perse School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was a former student of Eric Rideal. From an early age he was interested in chemistry, walking up and down Cambridge University chemical laboratory admiring all the equipment. His father encouraged him to construct and equip a small laboratory in his garden shed in his garden and supplied all the chemicals he needed to conduct experiments. This apparatus now...
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Alfred Werner
1866 - 1919 (53 years)
Alfred Werner was a Swiss chemist who was a student at ETH Zurich and a professor at the University of Zurich. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1913 for proposing the octahedral configuration of transition metal complexes. Werner developed the basis for modern coordination chemistry. He was the first inorganic chemist to win the Nobel Prize, and the only one prior to 1973.
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Henri Moissan
1852 - 1907 (55 years)
Ferdinand Frédéric Henri Moissan was a French chemist and pharmacist who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in isolating fluorine from its compounds. Moissan was one of the original members of the International Atomic Weights Committee.
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Fritz Strassmann
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann was a German chemist who, with Otto Hahn in December 1938, identified the element barium as a product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons. Their observation was the key piece of evidence necessary to identify the previously unknown phenomenon of nuclear fission, as was subsequently recognized and published by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch. In their second publication on nuclear fission in February of 1939, Strassmann and Hahn predicted the existence and liberation of additional neutrons during the fission process, opening up the possibility of a nuclear cha...
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Stanislao Cannizzaro
1826 - 1910 (84 years)
Stanislao Cannizzaro was an Italian chemist. He is famous for the Cannizzaro reaction and for his influential role in the atomic-weight deliberations of the Karlsruhe Congress in 1860. Biography Cannizzaro was born in Palermo in 1826. He entered the university there with the intention of making medicine his profession, but he soon turned to the study of chemistry. In 1845 and 1846, he acted as assistant to Raffaele Piria , known for his work on salicin, and who was then professor of chemistry at Pisa and subsequently occupied the same position at Turin.
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Karl Ziegler
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Karl Waldemar Ziegler was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963, with Giulio Natta, for work on polymers. The Nobel Committee recognized his "excellent work on organometallic compounds [which]...led to new polymerization reactions and ... paved the way for new and highly useful industrial processes". He is also known for his work involving free-radicals, many-membered rings, and organometallic compounds, as well as the development of Ziegler–Natta catalyst. One of many awards Ziegler received was the Werner von Siemens Ring in 1960 jointly with Otto Bayer and Walter Re...
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Emil Fischer
1852 - 1919 (67 years)
Hermann Emil Louis Fischer was a German chemist and 1902 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He discovered the Fischer esterification. He also developed the Fischer projection, a symbolic way of drawing asymmetric carbon atoms. He also hypothesized lock and key mechanism of enzyme action. He never used his first given name, and was known throughout his life simply as Emil Fischer.
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Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted was a Danish physical chemist, who developed the Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory simultaneously with and independently of Martin Lowry. Biography Brønsted was born in Varde, Denmark on 22 February 1879. His mother died shortly after his birth and at the age of 14, Brønsted lost his father and moved to Copenhagen with his older sister and his stepmother. In 1897, Brønsted began his studies as a chemical engineer at the Polytechnic Institute in Copenhagen. After his first degree, Brønsted changed fields and received his magister degree in chemistry in 1902 from the University of Copenhagen.
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Friedrich Konrad Beilstein
1838 - 1906 (68 years)
Friedrich Konrad Beilstein , was a Russian chemist and founder of the famous Handbuch der organischen Chemie . The first edition of this work, published in 1881, covered 1,500 compounds in 2,200 pages. This handbook is now known as the Beilstein database.
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Alfred Stock
1876 - 1946 (70 years)
Alfred Stock was a German inorganic chemist. He did pioneering research on the hydrides of boron and silicon, coordination chemistry, mercury, and mercury poisoning. The German Chemical Society's Alfred-Stock Memorial Prize is named after him.
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Giulio Natta
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Giulio Natta was an Italian chemical engineer and Nobel laureate. He won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963 with Karl Ziegler for work on high polymers. He also received a Lomonosov Gold Medal in 1969.
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Antoine Béchamp
1816 - 1908 (92 years)
Pierre Jacques Antoine Béchamp was a French scientist now best known for breakthroughs in applied organic chemistry and for a bitter rivalry with Louis Pasteur. Béchamp developed the Béchamp reduction, an inexpensive method to produce aniline dye, permitting William Henry Perkin to launch the synthetic-dye industry. Béchamp also synthesized the first organic arsenical drug, arsanilic acid, from which Paul Ehrlich later synthesized salvarsan, the first chemotherapeutic drug.
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Henry Cavendish
1731 - 1810 (79 years)
Henry Cavendish was an English natural philosopher and scientist who was an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He is noted for his discovery of hydrogen, which he termed "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper, On Factitious Airs. Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and gave the element its name.
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Alexander William Williamson
1824 - 1904 (80 years)
Prof Alexander William Williamson FRS FRSE PCS MRIA was an English chemist. He is best known today for the Williamson ether synthesis. Life Williamson was born in 1824 in Wandsworth, London, the second of three children of Alexander Williamson a clerk with the East India Company and his wife, Antonia McAndrew, daughter of a prominent London merchant. Despite early physical infirmity, the loss of sight in one eye and a largely useless left arm, Williamson grew up in a caring and stimulating intellectual environment. After an early childhood spent in Brighton and then schools in Kensington, Williams enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in 1841.
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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 .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Siegmund Gabriel
1851 - 1924 (73 years)
Siegmund Gabriel was a German chemist. Scientific career Siegmund Gabriel began studying chemistry at the University of Berlin in 1871. He continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg in 1872 with Professor Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1874, he received his doctorate and then returned to Berlin. He began teaching as an assistant, initially in the inorganic chemistry department, before becoming an associate professor in 1886. Gabriel later turned to organic chemistry in his own research.
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Peter Waage
1833 - 1900 (67 years)
Peter Waage was a Norwegian chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Kristiania. Along with his brother-in-law Cato Maximilian Guldberg, he co-discovered and developed the law of mass action between 1864 and 1879.
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Moses Gomberg
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Moses Gomberg was a chemistry professor at the University of Michigan. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and served as president of the American Chemical Society.
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Ludwig Knorr
1859 - 1921 (62 years)
Ludwig Knorr was a German chemist. Together with Carl Paal, he discovered the Paal–Knorr synthesis, and the Knorr quinoline synthesis and Knorr pyrrole synthesis are also named after him. The synthesis in 1883 of the analgesic drug antipyrine, now called phenazone, was a commercial success. Antipyrine was the first synthetic drug and the most widely used drug until it was replaced by Aspirin in the early 20th century.
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Hermann Irving Schlesinger
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Hermann Irving Schlesinger was an American inorganic chemist, working in boron chemistry. He and Herbert C. Brown discovered sodium borohydride in 1940 and both were involved in the further development of borohydride chemistry.
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Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner
1783 - 1857 (74 years)
Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner was a German chemist, natural scientist and a professor of physics and chemistry. Biography Kastner received his doctorate in 1805 under the guidance of Johann Göttling and began lecturing at the University of Jena. He moved on to become professor at the University of Halle in 1812. In 1818 he relocated to the University of Bonn, where he would mentor famous chemist Justus Liebig. He then moved on to the University of Erlangen in the summer of 1821, where he would remain for the rest of his professional life.
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Walter Noddack
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Walter Noddack was a German chemist. He, Ida Tacke , and Otto Berg reported the discovery of element 43 and element 75 in 1925. Rhenium They named element 75 rhenium . Rhenium was the last element to be discovered having a stable isotope. The existence of a yet undiscovered element at this position in the periodic table had been predicted by Henry Moseley in 1914. In 1925 they reported that they detected the element in platinum ore and in the mineral columbite. They also found rhenium in gadolinite and molybdenite. In 1928 they were able to extract 1 g of the element by processing 660 kg of molybdenite.
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William Cullen
1710 - 1790 (80 years)
William Cullen was a Scottish physician, chemist and agriculturalist, and professor at the Edinburgh Medical School. Cullen was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment: He was David Hume's physician, and was friends with Joseph Black, Henry Home, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith, among others.
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Bernard Courtois
1777 - 1838 (61 years)
Bernard Courtois, also spelled Barnard Courtois, was a French chemist credited with first isolating iodine, making early photography possible. By 1811 the Napoleonic Wars had made the government-controlled saltpeter business taper off since there was by then a shortage of wood ashes with which potassium nitrate was made. As an alternative, the needed potassium nitrate was derived from seaweed that was abundant on the Normandy and Brittany shores. The seaweed also had another, yet undiscovered, important chemical. One day towards the end of 1811 while Courtois was isolating sodium and potassium compounds from seaweed ash, he discovered iodine after he added sulfuric acid to the seaweed ash.
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Wilhelm Groth
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Wilhelm Groth was a German physical chemist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; his main activity was the development of centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. After the war, he was a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Hamburg. In 1950, he became director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Bonn. He was a principal in the 1956 shipment of three centrifuges for uranium enrichment to Brazil.
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Carl Shipp Marvel
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Carl Shipp "Speed" Marvel was an American chemist who specialized in polymer chemistry. He made important contributions to U.S. synthetic rubber program during World War II, and later worked at developing polybenzimidazoles, temperature-resistant polymers that are used in the aerospace industry, in fire-fighting equipment, and as a replacement for asbestos. He has been described as "one of the world's outstanding organic chemists" and received numerous awards, including the 1956 Priestley Medal and the 1986 National Medal of Science, presented by President Ronald Reagan.
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Victor Henri
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Victor Henri was a French-Russian physical chemist and physiologist. He was born in Marseilles as a son of Russian parents. He is known mainly as an early pioneer in enzyme kinetics. He published more than 500 papers in a variety of disciplines including biochemistry, physical chemistry, psychology, and physiology. Aleksey Krylov was his half-brother.
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Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge
1794 - 1867 (73 years)
Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge was a German analytical chemist. Runge identified the mydriatic effects of belladonna extract, identified caffeine, and discovered the first coal tar dye . Early life Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge was born near Hamburg on 8 February 1794. From a young age, Runge conducted chemical experiments, serendipitously identifying the mydriatic effects of belladonna extract.
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Max Bergmann
1886 - 1944 (58 years)
Max Bergmann was a Jewish-German biochemist. Together with Leonidas Zervas, the discoverer of the group, they were the first to use the carboxybenzyl protecting group for the synthesis of oligopeptides.
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Per Teodor Cleve
1840 - 1905 (65 years)
Per Teodor Cleve was a Swedish chemist, biologist, mineralogist and oceanographer. He is best known for his discovery of the chemical elements holmium and thulium. Born in Stockholm in 1840, Cleve earned his BSc and PhD from Uppsala University in 1863 and 1868, respectively. After receiving his PhD, he became an assistant professor of chemistry at the university. He later became professor of general and agricultural chemistry. In 1874 he theorised that didymium was in fact two elements; this theory was confirmed in 1885 when Carl Auer von Welsbach discovered neodymium and praseodymium.
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Boris Nikolsky
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Boris Petrovich Nikolsky , , was a Soviet chemist who played a crucial role in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. Besides his work on the plutonium chemistry, Nikolsky did a pioneering work in ion exchanges applications in radiochemistry and physical chemistry, and was a professor of chemistry at the Leningrad University . He academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
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Karl von Auwers
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Karl Friedrich von Auwers was a German chemist, and was the academic adviser of both Karl Ziegler and Georg Wittig at the University of Marburg. Life Karl Friedrich von Auwers was born the son of the renowned astronomer Arthur Auwers on in Gotha, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. He studied at first at the University of Heidelberg and later with August Wilhelm von Hofmann at the University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1885. After one further year with Hofmann he joined the group of Victor Meyer at the University of Göttingen and later at the University of Heidelberg. He stayed at Heidelberg until he became professor at the University of Greifswald in 1900.
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Farrington Daniels
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Farrington Daniels was an American physical chemist who is considered one of the pioneers of the modern direct use of solar energy. Biography Daniels was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 8, 1889. Daniels began day school in 1895 at the Kenwood School and then on to Douglas School. As a boy, he was fascinated with Thomas Edison, Samuel F. B. Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and John Charles Fields. He decided early that he wanted to be an electrician and inventor. He attended Central and East Side high schools. By this point he liked chemistry and physics, but equally enjoyed "Manual Train...
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Frank C. Whitmore
1887 - 1947 (60 years)
Frank Clifford Whitmore , nicknamed "Rocky", was a prominent chemist who submitted significant evidence for the existence of carbocation mechanisms in organic chemistry. He was born in 1887 in the town of North Attleborough, Massachusetts.
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Cato Maximilian Guldberg
1836 - 1902 (66 years)
Cato Maximilian Guldberg was a Norwegian mathematician and chemist. Guldberg is best known as a pioneer in physical chemistry. Background Guldberg was born in Christiania , Norway. He was the eldest son of Carl August Guldberg and Hanna Sophie Theresia Bull . He was the brother of nurse and educator Cathinka Guldberg as well as mathematician Axel Sophus Guldberg. He attended Aug. Holths private latinskole in Christiania. Guldberg studied mathematics and physics at the University of Christiania and took his diploma in 1859. That same year he received the Crown Prince's gold medal for a dissertation in pure mathematics.
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William Christopher Zeise
1789 - 1847 (58 years)
William Christopher Zeise was a Danish organic chemist. He is best known for synthesising one of the first organometallic compounds, named Zeise's salt in his honour. He also performed pioneering studies in organosulfur chemistry, discovering the xanthates in 1823.
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Friedrich Stromeyer
1776 - 1835 (59 years)
Prof Friedrich Stromeyer FRS FRSE was a German chemist. He was the discoverer of cadmium. From 1982 a Friedrich Stromeyer Prize has been awarded for chemical achievement in Germany. Life He was born in Göttingen on 2 August 1776 the eldest son of Dr Ernerst Johann Friedrich Stromeyer, professor of medicine at Göttingen University, and his wife, Marie Magdalena Johanne von Blum.
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Thomas Thomson
1773 - 1852 (79 years)
Thomas Thomson MD was a Scottish chemist and mineralogist whose writings contributed to the early spread of Dalton's atomic theory. His scientific accomplishments include the invention of the saccharometer and he gave silicon its current name. He served as president of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow.
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