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
Carl Wagner
1901 - 1977 (76 years)
Carl Wilhelm Wagner was a German Physical chemist. He is best known for his pioneering work on Solid-state chemistry, where his work on oxidation rate theory, counter diffusion of ions and defect chemistry led to a better understanding of how reactions take place at the atomic level. His life and achievements were honoured in a Solid State Ionics symposium commemorating his 100th birthday in 2001, where he was described as the Father of Solid State Chemistry.
Go to Profile#6202
Samuel Glasstone
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Samuel Glasstone was a British-born American academic and writer of scientific books. He authored over 40 popular textbooks on physical chemistry and electrochemistry, reaction rates, nuclear weapons effects, nuclear reactor engineering, Mars, space sciences, the environmental effects of nuclear energy and nuclear testing.
Go to Profile#6203
Wilhelm Schlenk
1879 - 1943 (64 years)
Wilhelm Johann Schlenk was a German chemist. He was born in Munich and also studied chemistry there. Schlenk succeeded Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin in 1919. Schlenk was an organic chemist who discovered organolithium compounds around 1917. He also investigated free radicals and carbanions and discovered that organomagnesium halides are capable of participating in a complex chemical equilibrium, now known as a Schlenk equilibrium.
Go to Profile#6204
John Gamble Kirkwood
1907 - 1959 (52 years)
John "Jack" Gamble Kirkwood was a noted chemist and physicist, holding faculty positions at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and Yale University. Early life and background Kirkwood was born in Gotebo, Oklahoma, the oldest child of John Millard and Lillian Gamble Kirkwood. His father was educated as an attorney and was a distributor for the Goodyear Corporation in the state of Kansas. In addition to Jack Kirkwood, there were two younger sisters: Caroline and Margaret .
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Saul Winstein
1912 - 1969 (57 years)
Saul Winstein was a Jewish Canadian chemist who discovered the Winstein reaction. He argued a non-classical cation was needed to explain the stability of the norbornyl cation. This fueled a debate with Herbert C. Brown over the existence of σ-delocalized carbocations. Winstein also first proposed the concept of an intimate ion pair. He was co-author of the Grunwald–Winstein equation, concerning solvolysis rates.
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Felix Hoppe-Seyler
1825 - 1895 (70 years)
Ernst Felix Immanuel Hoppe-Seyler was a German physiologist and chemist, and the principal founder of the disciplines of biochemistry and molecular biology. He had discovered Yeast nucleic acid which is now called RNA in his attempts to follow up and confirm Miescher's results by repeating parts of Miescher's experiments
Go to Profile#6207
Ivan Kablukov
1857 - 1942 (85 years)
Ivan Alekseyevich Kablukov was a Russian and Soviet physical chemist. He simultaneously and independently of Vladimir Kistiakovsky proposed the idea of ion solvation and initiated the unification of the physical and chemical theory of solutions. He published influential textbooks on organic chemistry and was a professor at Moscow State University and Timiryazev Agricultural Academy.
Go to Profile#6208
Frédéric Swarts
1866 - 1940 (74 years)
Frédéric Jean Edmond Swarts was a Belgian chemist who prepared the first chlorofluorocarbon, CF2Cl2 as well as several other related compounds. He was a professor in the civil engineering at the University of Ghent. In addition to his work on organofluorine chemistry, he authored the textbook "Cours de Chimie Organique." He was a son of Theodore Swarts and a colleague of Leo Baekeland.
Go to Profile#6209
Jacob Volhard
1834 - 1910 (76 years)
Jacob Volhard was the German chemist who discovered, together with his student Hugo Erdmann, the Volhard–Erdmann cyclization reaction. He was also responsible for the improvement of the Hell–Volhard–Zelinsky halogenation.
Go to Profile#6210
Herbert Freundlich
1880 - 1941 (61 years)
Herbert Max Finlay Freundlich was a German chemist. His father was of German Jewish descent, and his mother was from Scotland. His younger brother was Erwin Finlay Freundlich . He was a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry from 1919 until 1933, when the racial policies of the Nazi party demanded the dismissal of non-Aryans from senior posts. In 1934 he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Otto Hönigschmid
1878 - 1945 (67 years)
Otto Hönigschmid was a Czech/Austrian chemist. He published the first widely accepted experimental proof of isotopes along with Stefanie Horovitz. Throughout his career he worked to precisely define atomic weights for over 40 elements, and served on committees with the purpose of adopting internationally agreed upon values. After his home and laboratory in Munich were destroyed in World War II, he committed suicide in 1945.
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Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt, also Heinrich Jakob Goldschmidt , was a Jewish Austrian chemist who spent most of his career working in Norway. He studied chemistry at the Charles University in Prague, where he received his PhD in 1881. In the same year, he became professor at the ETH Zürich, where he worked with Victor Meyer. In 1888, his son Victor Goldschmidt was born; Victor later became a renowned mineralogist and founder of modern geochemistry. After working at the University of Amsterdam with Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff in 1894 and 1895, Heinrich Goldschmidt became full professor at the ETH.
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Max Trautz
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Max Trautz was a German chemist. He was very productive with over 190 scientific publications especially in the field of chemical kinetics. He was the first to investigate the activation energy of molecules by connecting Max Planck's new results concerning light with observations in chemistry.
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Maud Menten
1879 - 1960 (81 years)
Maud Leonora Menten was a Canadian physician and chemist. As a bio-medical and medical researcher, she made significant contributions to enzyme kinetics and histochemistry, and invented a procedure that remains in use. She is primarily known for her work with Leonor Michaelis on enzyme kinetics in 1913. The paper has been translated from its written language of German into English.
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Bohuslav Brauner
1855 - 1935 (80 years)
Bohuslav Brauner was a Czech chemist from the University of Prague, who investigated the properties of the rare earth elements, especially the determination of their atomic weights. Brauner predicted the existence of the rare earth element promethium ten years before the existence of the gap was confirmed experimentally . In the 1880s, when he already had started lecturing in Prague, he still competed internationally in cycling races.
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Franz Joseph Emil Fischer
1877 - 1947 (70 years)
Franz Joseph Emil Fischer was a German chemist. He was the founder and first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research. He is known for the discovery of the Fischer–Tropsch process.
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Fritz Ullmann
1875 - 1939 (64 years)
Fritz Ullmann was a German chemist. Ullmann was born in Fürth and started studying chemistry in Nuremberg, but received his PhD of the University of Geneva for work with Carl Gräbe in 1895. After some time in Geneva he went to Berlin in 1905. Ullmann taught technical chemistry during 1905-1913 and 1922-1925 at the Technischen Hochschule Berlin now Technische Universität Berlin, first as part of the ordinary teaching staff, later on as a professor. In 1900 he introduced dimethyl sulfate as an alkylating agent. Between 1914 and 1922, when he was back in Geneva, he published the first edition o...
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Merle Randall
1888 - 1950 (62 years)
Merle Randall was an American physical chemist famous for his work with Gilbert N. Lewis, over a period of 25 years, in measuring reaction heat of chemical compounds and determining their corresponding free energy. Together, their 1923 textbook "Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances" became a classic work in the field of chemical thermodynamics.
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Frank Wigglesworth Clarke
1847 - 1931 (84 years)
Frank Wigglesworth Clarke of Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. was an American scientist and chemist. Sometimes known as the "Father of Geochemistry," Clarke is credited with determining the composition of the Earth's crust. He was a founder of The American Chemical Society and served as its President, 1901.
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Jocelyn Field Thorpe
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Sir Jocelyn Field Thorpe FRS was a British chemist who made major contributions to organic chemistry, including the Thorpe-Ingold effect and three named reactions. Early life and education Thorpe was born in Clapham, London on 1 December 1872, one of nine children and the sixth son, of Mr. and Mrs. W.G. Thorpe of the Middle Temple. He attended Worthing College, and then from 1888 - 1890 studied engineering at King's College, London. He then moved to the Royal College of Science from 1890 - 1892 to study chemistry. He earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry under Karl von Auwers at Heidelberg University in 1895.
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Ira Remsen
1846 - 1927 (81 years)
Ira Remsen was an American chemist who discovered the artificial sweetener saccharin along with Constantin Fahlberg. He was the second president of Johns Hopkins University. He was the founder of the American Chemical Journal, which he edited from 1879 to 1914.
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Nikolai Kischner
1867 - 1935 (68 years)
Nikolai Matveyevich Kischner was a Russian chemist and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Biography After graduating from the Moscow Classical Gymnasium in 1886 Kischner enrolled to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University. Since 1889 he focused on organic chemistry, studying under Vladimir Luginin and Vladimir Markovnikov. In 1890, he completed his courses and started working on a PhD on "Amines and hydrazines of polymethylene series, methods of their preparation and transformation", which he defended in 1895. In 1900, he defended a habilitation on "The action of silver oxide and hydroxylamine on bromamines.
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Alicja Dorabialska
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Alicja Dorabialska , was a Polish chemist. Life Alicja Dorabialska was born in Sosnowiec, Vistula Land, Russian Empire on 14 October 1897. She graduated from a high school in Warsaw in 1914 and then enrolled in the Physical-Mathematical Department of the Moscow Higher Women's Courses the following year, graduating in 1918. Dorabialska received her Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw in 1922 and studied under Marie Curie at the Radium Institute, Paris in 1925. Dorabialska was an assistant in the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Warsaw University of Technology from 1918 to 1932. Two years lat...
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Hans Heinrich Landolt
1831 - 1910 (79 years)
Hans Heinrich Landolt was a Swiss chemist who discovered iodine clock reaction. He is also one of the founders of Landolt–Börnstein database. He tested law of mass conservation which was given by Lavoisier.
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Gustaf Erik Pasch
1788 - 1862 (74 years)
Gustaf Erik Pasch was a Swedish inventor and professor of chemistry at Karolinska institute in Stockholm and inventor of the safety match. He was born in Norrköping, the son of a carpenter. He enrolled at Uppsala University in 1806 and graduated with a master's degree in 1821. Pasch is mostly known for the safety match, but he was also involved with making waterproof concrete for the Göta Canal, manufacture of bank notes and growing of silk worms. He married Augusta Fredrika Vilhelmina Berg in 1827.
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Josef Maria Eder
1855 - 1944 (89 years)
Josef Maria Eder was an Austrian chemist who specialized in the chemistry of photography, and who wrote a comprehensive early history of the technical development of chemical photography. Life and work Eder was born in Krems an der Donau in 1855. He studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology and at the University of Vienna. In 1876, he received his PhD and in 1879, after his habilitation, became lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology.
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Homer Burton Adkins
1892 - 1949 (57 years)
Homer Burton Adkins was an American chemist who studied the hydrogenation of organic compounds. Adkins was regarded as top in his field and a world authority on the hydrogenation of organic compounds. Adkins is known for his wartime work, where he experimented with chemical agents and poisonous gasses. Renowned for his work, Adkins eventually suffered a series of heart attacks and died in 1949.
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Julius Tafel
1862 - 1918 (56 years)
Julius Tafel was a Swiss chemist and electrochemist. Work He worked first with Hermann Emil Fischer on the field of organic chemistry, but changed to electrochemistry after his work with Wilhelm Ostwald. He is known for the discovery of an electrosynthetic rearrangement reaction of various alkylated ethyl acetoacetates to form hydrocarbons, now called the Tafel rearrangement, and the Tafel equation, which relates the rate of an electrochemical reaction to the overpotential. He is also credited for the discovery of the catalytic mechanism of hydrogen evolution . Tafel retired aged 48 due to il...
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Valery Legasov
1936 - 1988 (52 years)
Valery Alekseyevich Legasov was a Soviet inorganic chemist and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He is primarily known for his efforts to contain the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Legasov also presented the findings of an investigation to the International Atomic Energy Agency at the United Nations Office at Vienna, detailing the actions and circumstances that led to the explosion of Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
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Alexander Nesmeyanov
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Nesmeyanov was a Soviet chemist and academician specializing in organometallic chemistry. Biography He was born in Moscow. He had two brothers Vasily and Andrei and a sister Tatyana . His father , graduated with excellence Vladimir Gymnasium, and then the Faculty of Law of Moscow University. He became interested in enlightenment and was working as a public teacher in the village of Bushov for 10 years. He had married in 1898 and worked at the Moscow city government, then he was a director Bakhrushinsky orphanage in Moscow . Alexander's mother, Lyudmila Danilovna , was a multi-talented teacher.
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Anton Eduard van Arkel
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Anton Eduard van Arkel, was a Dutch chemist. Van Arkel suggested the names "pnictogen" and "pnictide" to refer to chemical elements in group 15 of the periodic table. Van Arkel, together with Jan Hendrik de Boer, developed a method for the preparation of very pure tungsten: the dissociation of the vapor of tungsten chloride on an incandescent core wire known as the Van Arkel–de Boer process. This method was later used by himself and others for many other metals and non-metals. Van Arkel and de Boer thus provided the first method to fabricate pure titanium.
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Carl Gustaf Mosander
1797 - 1858 (61 years)
Carl Gustaf Mosander was a Swedish chemist. He discovered the rare earth elements lanthanum, erbium and terbium. Early life and education Born in Kalmar, Mosander attended school there until he moved to Stockholm with his mother in 1809. In Stockholm, he became an apprentice at the Ugglan pharmacy. He took his pharmacy examination in 1817, but had an interest in medicine and joined the Karolinska Institute in 1820. He passed his medical examination in 1825. He worked in the laboratory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius and became a close friend of fellow student Friedrich Wöhler.
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Friedrich Fichter
1869 - 1952 (83 years)
Friedrich Fichter was a professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Basel. His main field of interest was electrochemistry. He initiated the founding of the scientific journal Helvetica Chimica Acta.
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William Allen Miller
1817 - 1870 (53 years)
William Allen Miller FRS was a British scientist. Life Miller was born in Ipswich, Suffolk and educated at Ackworth School and King's College London. He was related to William Allen and first cousin to the leading suffragist Anne Knight.
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James Flack Norris
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
James Flack Norris was an American chemist. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a Methodist minister, Norris was educated in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., before studying at Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated with an A.B. in chemistry. After graduating in 1892, he remained at the university to work as a fellow until 1895, when he was awarded his Ph.D. and became an academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He left MIT in 1904 to become the first professor of chemistry at the newly formed Simmons College, before returning to take up the position of professor of organic ch...
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Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner
1780 - 1849 (69 years)
Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner was a German chemist who is known best for work that was suggestive of the periodic law for the chemical elements, and for inventing the first lighter, which was known as the Döbereiner's lamp. He became a professor of chemistry and pharmacy for the University of Jena.
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Carl Gräbe
1841 - 1927 (86 years)
#6238
Thomas Charles Hope
1766 - 1844 (78 years)
Thomas Charles Hope was a Scottish physician, chemist and lecturer. He proved the existence of the element strontium, and gave his name to Hope's Experiment, which shows that water reaches its maximum density at .
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Theodor Zincke
1843 - 1928 (85 years)
Ernst Carl Theodor Zincke was a German chemist and the academic adviser of Otto Hahn. Life Theodor Zincke was born in Uelzen on 19 May 1843. He became a pharmacist and graduated in Göttingen with his Staatsexamen. He began studying chemistry with Friedrich Wöhler and received his Ph.D in 1869. He joined the group of August Kekulé at the University of Bonn, and in 1875 became professor at the University of Marburg where he remained until his retirement in 1913. He developed Zincke reaction, Zincke–Suhl reaction in 1906 and in 1900 Zincke nitration. Theodor Zincke died on 17 March 1928 in Marb...
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Philippe A. Guye
1862 - 1922 (60 years)
Philippe A. Guye FRS was a Swiss chemist who was awarded the Davy Medal in 1921 "for his researches in physical chemistry". Guye earned his Ph.D. at the University of Geneva, with research under the direction of Carl Gräbe. In 1892, Guye was elected to the “Chaire extraordinaire de chimie théorique et technique."
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St. Elmo Brady
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Saint Elmo Brady was an American chemist who was the first African American to obtain a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States. He received his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1916. Early life and education Saint Elmo Brady was born on December 22, 1884, in Louisville, Kentucky. Greatly influenced by Thomas W. Talley, a pioneer in the teaching of science, Brady received his bachelor's degree from Fisk University in 1908 at the age of 24, and immediately began teaching at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Brady also had a close relationship with and was mentored by Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.
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Icilio Guareschi
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Icilio Guareschi was an Italian chemist. Icilio Guareschi studied at the University of Bologna and received his Ph.D there in 1871. He became professor at the University of Siena and in 1879 at the University of Turin, where he worked until his death in 1918.
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Nikolay Beketov
1827 - 1911 (84 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Beketov was a Russian Imperial physical chemist and metallurgist. He was the father of a well-known Russian architect Alexei Beketov. Life and work In 1849, Beketov graduated from Kazan University and worked with Nikolay Zinin. In 1855, he became a junior scientific assistant in the Department of Chemistry at Kharkov University. In 1859–1887, Beketov was a professor at the same university. In 1865, he defended his PhD thesis on "Research into the phenomenon of displacement of one element by another" . In 1886, Beketov moved to Saint Petersburg, where he worked at the academic chemical laboratory and taught at the University for Women.
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Bernhard Tollens
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
Bernhard Christian Gottfried Tollens was a German chemist. Life and work Tollens attended school at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg where he was influenced by his science teacher, Karl Möbius. After graduating in 1857, Tollens started an apprenticeship in pharmacy. He finished in 1862 and began studying chemistry in Göttingen in Wöhler's laboratory, then supervised by Friedrich Konrad Beilstein and Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig. In 1864, Tollens submitted his thesis and received his Ph.D. without a defense. The latter was possible through the intercession of Wöhler so that Tollens could accept and begin an attractive job at a bronze factory.
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Ivan Stranski
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Ivan Nikolov Stranski was a Bulgarian physical chemist who is considered the father of crystal growth research. He was the founder of the Bulgarian school of physical chemistry, heading the departments of physical chemistry at Sofia University and later at the Technical University of Berlin, of which he was also rector. The Stranski–Krastanov growth and Kossel–Stranski model are some of Stranski's contributions which bear his name.
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Joseph Henry Gilbert
1817 - 1901 (84 years)
Sir Joseph Henry Gilbert was an English chemist, noteworthy for his long career spent improving the methods of practical agriculture. Along with J.B. Lawes, he conducted experiments at Rothamstead for forty years. One of the key findings of Lawes and Gilbert was that cereal crops took up nitrogen from the soil, contrary to the ideas of Justus von Liebig who held that it was obtained only from the air. Their work made Rothamstead a leading centre of agricultural research. Gilbert became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1860.
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Julius Nieuwland
1878 - 1936 (58 years)
Julius Aloysius Arthur Nieuwland, CSC, was a Belgian-born Holy Cross priest and professor of chemistry and botany at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is known for his contributions to acetylene research and its use as the basis for one type of synthetic rubber, which eventually led to the invention of neoprene by DuPont.
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Rudolf Criegee
1902 - 1975 (73 years)
Rudolf Criegee was a German organic chemist. Early life Criegee's family was wealthy. His father worked as a court director. The family was national liberal, Prussian and Protestant, managing what Rudolf Criegee felt was a great fortune. His happy childhood was ended by the World War I. In March 1915, his eldest brother died on the Western Front, while a second brother was seriously injured in the summer of 1916. Criegee himself was drafted.
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Andrew Ure
1778 - 1857 (79 years)
Andrew Ure FRS was a Scottish physician, chemist, scriptural geologist, and early business theorist who founded the Garnet Hill Observatory. He was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society. Ure published a number of books based on his industrial consulting experiences.
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Ellen Swallow Richards
1842 - 1911 (69 years)
Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards was an American industrial and safety engineer, environmental chemist, and university faculty member in the United States during the 19th century. Her pioneering work in sanitary engineering, and experimental research in domestic science, laid a foundation for the new science of home economics. She was the founder of the home economics movement characterized by the application of science to the home, and the first to apply chemistry to the study of nutrition.
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