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,
#6251
Aleksander Kocwa
1901 - 1959 (58 years)
Aleksander Kocwa was a Polish chemist, professor of the Jagiellonian University, dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Jagiellonian University and of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Medical College in Kraków. Arrested during Sonderaktion Krakau, he was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. After the release he organized secret teaching for students of pharmacy and chemistry in Nazi-occupied Kraków.
Go to Profile#6252
Hans-Werner Wanzlick
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Hans-Werner Wanzlick was a German chemist. A Professor of chemistry at the Berlin Technical University he is notable for work on persistent carbenes and for proposing the Wanzlick equilibrium between saturated imidazolin-2-ylidenes and their dimerss — which he called "das doppelte Lottchen", after a 1949 novel by Erich Kästner about a pair of mischievous twins.
Go to Profile#6253
Ward V. Evans
1880 - 1957 (77 years)
Ward Vinton Evans was a chemist who served as a professor at Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago. He was known as one of three members of the commission which revoked the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Evans was the only member who voted to allow Oppenheimer to retain his security clearance, stating that failure to clear Oppenheimer would be "a black mark on the escutcheon of our country.".
Go to Profile#6254
Robert Jacobus Forbes
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Robert Jacobus Forbes or Robert James Forbes was a Dutch chemist and historian of science and professor in the history of applied science and technology at the University of Amsterdam. In his days Forbes was internationally one of the best known and respected historian of technology, and recipient of the first Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the highest award by the Society for the History of Technology .
Go to Profile#6255
Shirō Akabori
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Shirō Akabori , 20 October 1900 – 3 November 1992 in Chihama, Ogasa , was a Japanese chemist and university professor, known for the Akabori amino-acid reactions. Life and education After graduating from public school, he began training as a pharmacist at Chiba medical school, now Chiba University, in 1918. After graduating in 1921, he joined the pharmaceutical company Momotani Juntenkan. The company hired him as an assistant to the chemist Nishizawa Yūshichi of the Imperial University of Tokyo, where he was taught by Ikeda Kikunae. In the summer of the same year, he followed Nishizawa for a short stay at the Tohoku Imperial University to learn organic chemistry from Majima Rikō.
Go to Profile#6256
Leo Baekeland
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
Leo Hendrik Baekeland was a Belgian chemist. He is best known for the inventions of Velox photographic paper in 1893, and Bakelite in 1907. He has been called "The Father of the Plastics Industry" for his invention of Bakelite, an inexpensive, non-flammable and versatile plastic, which marked the beginning of the modern plastics industry.
Go to Profile#6257
John Masson Gulland
1898 - 1947 (49 years)
John Masson Gulland was a Scottish chemist and biochemist. His main work was on nucleic acids, morphine and aporphine alkaloids. His work at University College Nottingham on electrometric titration was important in leading to the discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick, and he was described as "a great nucleic acid chemist." He established the Scottish Seaweed Research Association and the Lace Research Council.
Go to Profile#6258
Warren L. McCabe
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Warren Lee McCabe was an American Physical Chemist and is considered as one of the founding fathers of the profession of chemical engineering. He is widely known for the eponymous McCabe–Thiele method for analysis of distillation processes and his book, Unit Operations of Chemical Engineering, a major textbook.
Go to Profile#6259
Denis Jordan
1914 - 1982 (68 years)
Denis Oswald Jordan AO FAA FRACI was an Anglo-Australian chemist with a distinguished career as a researcher and lecturer in Chemistry at both University College Nottingham and the University of Adelaide, where he was Angas Professor of Chemistry from 1958 to 1982. Jordan also served as president of Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering from 1958 to 1962, and Royal Australian Chemical Institute from 1978 to 1979.
Go to Profile#6260
Charles L. Christ
1916 - 1980 (64 years)
Charles Louis Christ was an American scientist, geochemist and mineralogist. Education He received his Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, completing his Ph.D. in 1940.
Go to Profile#6261
George Barger
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
George Barger FRS FRSE FCS LLD was a British chemist. Life He was born to an English mother, Eleanor Higginbotham, and Gerrit Barger, a Dutch engineer in Manchester, England. He was educated at Utrecht and The Hague High School. He subsequently attended King's College, Cambridge for his undergraduate degree and University College London to do a doctorate of science. His main work focused on the study of alkaloids and investigations of simple nitrogenous compounds of biological importance. Barger identified tyramine as one of the compounds responsible for the biological activity of ergot extracts.
Go to Profile#6262
Edward Curtis Franklin
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Edward Curtis Franklin was an American chemist. Biography Edward Franklin was born in Geary County, Kansas. He entered the University of Kansas at the age of 22, obtaining his major in chemistry in 1888. Two years later he decided to study at the University of Berlin for one year, but abandon it by 1891. In 1892 he came back to State University where he remained till 1893 working as assistant chemist. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University where he received his doctorate in chemistry a year later. He then came back to University of Kansas where he spent one year as a chemist while the rest of the years he was an associate professor there.
Go to Profile#6263
Hans Meerwein
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
Hans Meerwein was a German chemist. Several reactions and reagents bear his name, most notably the Meerwein–Ponndorf–Verley reduction, the Wagner–Meerwein rearrangement, the Meerwein arylation reaction, and Meerwein's salt.
Go to Profile#6264
Gregory P. Baxter
1876 - 1953 (77 years)
Gregory Paul Baxter was an American chemist notable for his work on atomic weights. Biography Born in Somerville, Massachusetts, Baxter became an instructor in chemistry at Harvard in 1897. Dr Baxter served as chairman of the Harvard Chemistry Department from 1911 to 1932. In 1925 he assumed the Theodore William Richards Professorship, which he held until his retirement in 1944.
Go to Profile#6265
Morris Sugden
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Sir Theodore Morris Sugden FRS, was a British chemist who specialised in combustion research. Biography Theodore Morris Sugden was born in the village of Triangle, the only child of Florence and Frederick Morris Sugden, a clerk in a mill. After attending Sowerby Bridge and District Secondary School he gained an open scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1938, where he read chemistry and was awarded a First in 1940. That year he began research under physicist W C Price on the measurement of precise ionization potentials of molecules. He later switched to working with R G W Norrish for ...
Go to Profile#6266
David A. Frank-Kamenetskii
1910 - 1970 (60 years)
David Albertovich Frank-Kamenetskii was a Soviet theoretical physicist and chemist, professor and doctor of physical, chemical and mathematical sciences. He developed the thermal explosion theory, worked on plasma physics problems and in astrophysics.
Go to Profile#6267
Gerhard Krohn Rollefson
1900 - 1955 (55 years)
Gerhard Krohn Rollefson was a professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Background and career Rollefson received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His dissertation concerned Ebullioscopic constant measurement of mixed liquid media. He then completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Rollefson was a specialist in physical chemistry and studied the impact of X-ray radiation on a variety of materials. Rollefson published a book with Milton Burton in 1939: Photochemist...
Go to Profile#6268
Samuel Cate Prescott
1872 - 1962 (90 years)
Samuel Cate Prescott was an American food scientist and microbiologist who was involved in the development of food safety, food science, public health, and industrial microbiology. Early life Prescott was born in South Hampton, New Hampshire, the younger of two children. An older sister, Grace, later became a teacher in South Hampton, located near the Amesbury, Massachusetts area, located across the New Hampshire-Massachusetts state line. His formal education was in an ungraded schoolhouse in New Hampshire. During his fifteenth year, Prescott served as a "rod man" on a surveying crew to lay o...
Go to Profile#6269
Francis William Bergstrom
1897 - 1946 (49 years)
Francis William Bergstrom, Ph.D. was an American professor of chemistry at Stanford University. Bergstrom was born in Bloomington, Indiana on January 10, 1897, then moved to Stanford when he was 11 years old. He enrolled at Stanford and received a B.S. in 1918 and a Ph.D. in 1922, working with Edward Curtis Franklin. His postdoctoral work was undertaken at Clark University and Brown University, working with Charles A. Kraus. His independent career lasted 29 years at Stanford, during which time he wrote 70 peer-reviewed papers on nitrogen chemistry and served as an Associate Editor for The Jou...
Go to Profile#6270
Paul Flory
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Paul John Flory was an American chemist and Nobel laureate who was known for his work in the field of polymers, or macromolecules. He was a leading pioneer in understanding the behavior of polymers in solution, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1974 "for his fundamental achievements, both theoretical and experimental, in the physical chemistry of macromolecules".
Go to Profile#6271
Henry Eyring
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Henry Eyring was a Mexico-born United States theoretical chemist whose primary contribution was in the study of chemical reaction rates and intermediates. Eyring developed the Absolute Rate Theory or Transition state theory of chemical reactions, connecting the fields of chemistry and physics through atomic theory, quantum theory, and statistical mechanics.
Go to Profile#6272
Irving Langmuir
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Irving Langmuir was an American chemist, physicist, and engineer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his work in surface chemistry. Langmuir's most famous publication is the 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure". Langmuir became embroiled in a priority dispute with Lewis over this work; Langmuir's presentation skills were largely responsible for the popularization of the theory, although the credit for the theory itself belongs mostly to Lewis.
Go to Profile#6273
Robert S. Mulliken
1896 - 1986 (90 years)
Robert Sanderson Mulliken was an American physicist and chemist, primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory, i.e. the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules. Mulliken received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1966 and the Priestley Medal in 1983.
Go to Profile#6274
Mary Elvira Weeks
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Mary Elvira Weeks was an American chemist and historian of science. Weeks was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Kansas and the first woman to be a faculty member there.
Go to Profile#6275
Izaak Kolthoff
1894 - 1993 (99 years)
Izaak Maurits Kolthoff was an analytical chemist and chemistry educator. He is widely considered the father of analytical chemistry for his large volume of published research in diverse fields of analysis, his work to modernize and promote the field, and for advising a large number of students who went on to influential careers of their own.
Go to Profile#6276
Harold Urey
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Harold Clayton Urey was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, as well as contributing to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.
Go to Profile#6277
Paul Hugh Emmett
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Paul Hugh Emmett was an American chemist best known for his pioneering work in the field of catalysis and for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He spearheaded the research to separate isotopes of uranium and to develop a corrosive uranium gas. Emmett also made significant contributions to BET Theory which explains the relationship between surface area and gas adsorption. He served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University for 23 years throughout his scientific career.
Go to Profile#6278
Lars Onsager
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Lars Onsager was an American physical chemist and theoretical physicist. He held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968.
Go to Profile#6279
William Draper Harkins
1873 - 1951 (78 years)
William Draper Harkins was an American physical chemist, noted for his contributions to surface chemistry and nuclear chemistry. Harkins researched the structure of the atomic nucleus and was the first to propose the principle of nuclear fusion, four years before Jean Baptiste Perrin published his theory in 1919-20. His findings enabled, among other things, the development of the H-bomb. As a visiting professor with Fritz Haber in 1909, he was introduced to the study of surface tension, and he began work on the theory of solutions and solubility during a visit to MIT in 1909-1910.
Go to Profile#6280
Charles R. Hauser
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Charles Roy Hauser was an American chemist. Hauser was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a professor of chemistry at Duke University. Notable work The Sommelet–Hauser rearrangement is a named reaction based on the work of Hauser and Sommelet involving the rearrangement of certain benzyl quaternary ammonium salts. The reagent is sodium amide or another alkali metal amide and the reaction product a N,N-dialkylbenzylamine with a new alkyl group in the aromatic ortho position. For example, benzyltrimethylammonium iodide, [N3]I, rearranges in the presence of sodium amide to yield t...
Go to Profile#6281
T. R. Seshadri
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Thiruvengadam Rajendram Seshadri FNA, FRS was an Indian chemist, academic, writer and the Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Delhi, known for his researches on the Indian medicinal and other plants. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, UK and an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Besides several articles, he also published two books, Chemistry of Vitamins and Hormones and Advancement of Scientific and Religious Culture in India. The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 1963, for his contribu...
Go to Profile#6282
Karl Freudenberg
1886 - 1983 (97 years)
Karl Johann Freudenberg was a German chemist who did early seminal work on the absolute configurations to carbohydrates, terpenes, and steroids, and on the structure of cellulose and other polysaccharides, and on the nature, structure, and biosynthesis of lignin. The Research Institute for the Chemistry of Wood and Polysaccharides at the University of Heidelberg was created for him in the mid to late 1930s, and he led this until 1969.
Go to Profile#6283
Yakov Zeldovich
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich , also known as YaB, was a leading Soviet physicist of Belarusian origin, who is known for his prolific contributions in physical cosmology, physics of thermonuclear reactions, combustion, and hydrodynamical phenomena.
Go to Profile#6284
Arthur Lindo Patterson
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Arthur Lindo Patterson was a pioneering British X-ray crystallographer. Patterson was born to British parents in New Zealand in 1902. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Montreal, Canada and later to London, England. In 1920 Patterson moved to Canada for college at McGill University, Montreal. Firstly he concentrated on Mathematics and but then changed his major to Physics. He received his bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's in 1924. His master's thesis was on the production of hard X-rays by interaction of radium β rays with solids.
Go to Profile#6285
Robert E. Rundle
1915 - 1963 (48 years)
Robert Eugene Rundle was an American chemist and crystallographer. He was a professor at Iowa State University and fellow of the American Physical Society. Early life and education Rundle was born in Orleans, Nebraska in 1915. He attended University of Nebraska where he completed a bachelor of science in 1937 and a master's degree in 1938. He completed a Ph.D. in 1941 at the California Institute of Technology. His advisors were Linus Pauling and J. Holmes Sturdivant.
Go to Profile#6286
Hobart Hurd Willard
1881 - 1974 (93 years)
Hobart Hurd Willard was an analytical chemist and inorganic chemist who spent most of his career at the University of Michigan. He was known for his teaching skill and his authorship of widely used textbooks. His research interests were wide-ranging and involved the characterization of perchloric acid and periodic acid salts.
Go to Profile#6287
Edgar Steacie
1900 - 1962 (62 years)
Edgar William Richard Steacie was a Canadian physical chemist and president of the National Research Council of Canada from 1952 to 1962. Education Born in Montreal, Quebec, the only child of Richard Steacie and Alice Kate McWood, he studied a year at the Royal Military College of Canada. In 1923, he received his Bachelor of Science degree and his Ph.D. in 1926 from McGill University.
Go to Profile#6288
Robert Garrels
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Robert Minard Garrels was an American geochemist. Garrels applied experimental physical chemistry data and techniques to geology and geochemistry problems. The book Solutions, Minerals, and Equilibria co-authored in 1965 by Garrels and Charles L. Christ revolutionized aqueous geochemistry.
Go to Profile#6289
Ulrich Hofmann
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Ulrich Hofmann was a German chemist known for his study of clay minerals and the pioneering use of electron microscopes in the study of carbonaceous materials. Education and career Hofmann was born in Munich in 1903 and the son of the German chemist Karl Andreas Hofmann. He studied chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin and obtained a diploma in 1925. He went on to receive his doctorate in 1926 from his father with the work Glanzkohlenstoff und die Reihe des schwarzen kristallinen Kohlenstoffs . In 1931 he received habilitation on graphite oxide and then worked as a lecturer at the T...
Go to Profile#6290
Nathaniel Oglesby Calloway
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Nathaniel Oglesby Calloway was an American chemist and physician. Calloway was the first African American to receive an academic doctorate from an institute west of the Mississippi River and the first African American to receive a PhD in chemistry from Iowa State University .
Go to Profile#6291
Charles D. Coryell
1912 - 1971 (59 years)
Charles DuBois Coryell was an American chemist who was one of the discoverers of the element promethium. Coryell earned a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1935 as the student of Arthur A. Noyes. During the late 1930s he engaged in research on the structure of hemoglobin in association with Linus Pauling. He also taught at UCLA before 1942. In 1942 he accepted a job with the Manhattan Project, for which he was Chief of the Fission Products Section, both at the University of Chicago and at Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee . His group had responsibility for character...
Go to Profile#6292
Francis William Aston
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Francis William Aston FRS was a British chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes in many non-radioactive elements and for his enunciation of the whole number rule. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#6293
Bernd Eistert
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Bernd Eistert was a German chemist. Together with Fritz Arndt he discovered the Arndt-Eistert synthesis. Life Eistert was born in Ohlau , Prussian Silesia. After he received his PhD in Breslau in 1927 for his work with Fritz Arndt he worked for the BASF company from 1929 till 1943. He worked at the Technical University of Darmstadt from 1943 till 1957 when he changed to the University of Saarbrücken, where he retired in 1971.
Go to Profile#6294
Klaus Clusius
1903 - 1963 (60 years)
Klaus Paul Alfred Clusius was a German physical chemist from Breslau , Silesia. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on isotope separation techniques and heavy water production. After the war, he was a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Zurich. He died in Zurich.
Go to Profile#6295
Francisco Zaera
Francisco Zaera is a Venezuelan-American chemist, currently a distinguished professor at University of California, Riverside and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society and the American Vacuum Society.
Go to Profile#6296
Erich Clar
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Erich Clar was an Austrian organic chemist who studied polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon chemistry. He is considered as the father of that field. In 1941, he authored "Aromatische Kohlenwasserstoffe" and in 1964 the greatly expanded two-volume Polycyclic Hydrocarbons, which described the syntheses, properties, and UV-visible absorption spectra of hundreds of PAHs. He discovered the Clar reaction of the cyclic ketone perinaphthenone to form dibenzo[cd,lm]perylene in a 400 C melt of zinc dust, zinc chloride, and sodium chloride. He created the Sextet Theory, now eponymously called Clar's rule, to describe the behavior of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon isomers.
Go to Profile#6297
Franz Hein
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Franz Hein was a German scientist and artist. History Franz Hein was born in Grötzingen , Germany. His high school years were spent in Leipzig, as well as, his college years at the University of Leipzig. Hein completed his Ph.D. in 1917 on optical studies of bismuth and triphenylmethane derivatives. Hein made Assistant at the University and in 1920 Oberassistent. He continued working on his Habilitation becoming a professor in 1923. With the completion of his Habilitation, Hein went to work on organometallic system electrochemistry.
Go to Profile#6298
Floyd Bartell
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Floyd Earl Bartell was a chemist who spent his entire academic career at the University of Michigan. He specialized in the study of colloids. Early life and education Bartell was born on June 16, 1883, in Concord, Michigan. He was an undergraduate at Albion College and graduated in 1905. After a short period as an instructor of chemistry at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, Bartell returned to Michigan and began graduate studies in chemistry at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in 1910.
Go to Profile#6299
Arlie W. Schorger
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Arlie William Schorger was a chemical researcher and businessman who also did work in ornithology. His chemistry work of note largely involved wood and waterproofing. His only chemistry book was The chemistry of cellulose and wood, but he had 34 patents.
Go to Profile#6300
E. J. Bowen
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Edmund John Bowen FRS was a British physical chemist. Early life and wartime career E. J. Bowen was the eldest of four born to Edmund Riley Bowen and Lilias Bowen in 1898 in Worcester, England. He attended the Royal Grammar School Worcester.
Go to Profile