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.
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#6251
Ivan Knunyants
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Ivan Lyudvigovich Knunyants , was a Soviet chemist of Armenian origin, academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, a major general and engineer, who significantly contributed to the advancement of Soviet chemistry. He made more than 200 inventions, many of which used in the Soviet industry.
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Georg-Maria Schwab
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Georg-Maria Schwab was a German-Greek physical chemist recognised for his important contributions in the field of catalysis and the kinetics thereof. Schwab's early academic career in Berlin and Würzburg was characterised by meticulous experimental work as a kineticist, before starting his specialisation in heterogeneous catalysis in Munich . Dismissed by Nazi Germany on anti-Semitic grounds, he emigrated to Greece with the help of his future wife Elly Schwab-Agallidis, where together, they continued conducting physico-chemical research . Eventually returning to West Germany in the 1950s, S...
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Charles Huntington Whitman
1873 - 1937 (64 years)
Charles Huntington Whitman was the chair of the department of English at Rutgers University for 26 years and a noted scholar of Edmund Spenser and early English verse. Biography Whitman was born in Abbot, Maine, to Nathan Whitman and Helen Augusta Thoms but attended Bangor High School in Bangor, Maine before obtaining his B.A. from Colby College in 1897. In 1900, he received a PhD from Yale University for a dissertation on The Birds in Old English Literature. In the same year, he completed a translation of Cynewulf's The Christ, a companion to Yale professor Albert Stanburrough Cook's critical edition of the poem.
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James Irvine
1877 - 1952 (75 years)
Sir James Colquhoun Irvine KBE JP PhD DL DSc BSc FRS FRSE FEIS was a British organic chemist and Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews from 1921 until his death. As a research chemist, Irvine worked on the application of methylation techniques to carbohydrates, and isolated the first methylated sugars, trimethyl and tetramethyl glucose.
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George Kistiakowsky
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
George Bogdanovich Kistiakowsky was a Ukrainian-American physical chemistry professor at Harvard who participated in the Manhattan Project and later served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Science Advisor.
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Theodor Seliwanoff
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Theodor Seliwanoff , born as Fedor Fedorovic Selivanov was a chemist who invented the Seliwanoff's test in 1887 while working in Metchnikow University of Odesa in Odessa, Russian Empire.
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Thomas Easterfield
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
Sir Thomas Hill Easterfield was born in Doncaster the youngest of four children of Edward Easterfield, savings bank secretary, and Susan . He attended Doncaster Grammar School, and later entered the Yorkshire College of Science, now the University of Leeds. He was then appointed a Senior Foundation Scholar of Clare College, Cambridge, from where he gained First Class honours in the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1886.
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Tadeusz Estreicher
1871 - 1952 (81 years)
Tadeusz Kazimierz Estreicher was a Polish chemist, historian and cryogenics pioneer. Life Tadeusz Estreicher was born in Kraków when the city was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. He grew up in the intellectual atmosphere of an influential dynasty of professors at the Jagiellonian University. His father, Karol Józef Estreicher, was a historian of literature and the chief librarian of the university. His brother, Stanisław, was a historian of law and his sister, Maria, was one of the first women in Austria-Hungary to earn a doctorate .
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Marc Tiffeneau
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Marc Émile Pierre Adolphe Tiffeneau was a French chemist who co-discovered the Tiffeneau-Demjanov rearrangement. In 1899 he graduated from the École de pharmacie de Paris, and afterwards began work as a pharmacy intern in Paris hospitals. In 1904 he was named chief pharmacist at the Hôpital Boucicaut, and from 1927, worked in a similar capacity at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. From 1926 to 1944 he was a professor of pharmacology to the faculty of medicine at the Sorbonne.
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Justus von Liebig
1803 - 1873 (70 years)
Justus Freiherr von Liebig was a German scientist who made major contributions to agricultural and biological chemistry, and is considered one of the principal founders of organic chemistry. As a professor at the University of Giessen, he devised the modern laboratory-oriented teaching method, and for such innovations, he is regarded as one of the greatest chemistry teachers of all time. He has been described as the "father of the fertilizer industry" for his emphasis on nitrogen and trace minerals as essential plant nutrients, and his formulation of the law of the minimum, which described ho...
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Dmitri Mendeleev
1834 - 1907 (73 years)
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834–1907) was a Russian chemist, who is often considered the principal discoverer of the Periodic Table of the Elements—perhaps the single most-important, unifying idea in the field of chemistry, as well as one of the most recognizable icons in all of science. Mendeleev (in older literature, the name is usually transliterated as “Mendeleyev”) was born in Verkhnie Aremzyani, a village near Tobolsk, in Siberia. His father was a schoolmaster and sometime secondary school philosophy professor. His grandfather was a Russian Orthodox priest. He was the youngest of 14 brothers and sisters who survived early infancy.
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Fritz Haber
1868 - 1934 (66 years)
Fritz Haber was a Jewish German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilisers and explosives. It is estimated that one-third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half of the world's population. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid...
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Svante Arrhenius
1859 - 1927 (68 years)
Svante August Arrhenius was a Swedish scientist. Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate. In 1905, he became the director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death.
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Friedrich Wöhler
1800 - 1882 (82 years)
Friedrich Wöhler FRS HonFRSE was a German chemist known for his work in both organic and inorganic chemistry, being the first to isolate the chemical elements beryllium and yttrium in pure metallic form. He was the first to prepare several inorganic compounds, including silane and silicon nitride.
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Wilhelm Ostwald
1853 - 1932 (79 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was a Baltic German chemist and philosopher. Ostwald is credited with being one of the founders of the field of physical chemistry, with Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, Walther Nernst, and Svante Arrhenius. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his scientific contributions to the fields of catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities.
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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.
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Walther Nernst
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Walther Hermann Nernst was a German physicist and physical chemist known for his work in thermodynamics, physical chemistry, electrochemistry, and solid state physics. His formulation of the Nernst heat theorem helped pave the way for the third law of thermodynamics, for which he won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is also known for developing the Nernst equation in 1887.
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Robert Bunsen
1811 - 1898 (87 years)
Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium and rubidium with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. The Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after Bunsen and Kirchhoff.
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August Wilhelm von Hofmann
1818 - 1892 (74 years)
August Wilhelm von Hofmann was a German chemist who made considerable contributions to organic chemistry. His research on aniline helped lay the basis of the aniline-dye industry, and his research on coal tar laid the groundwork for his student Charles Mansfield's practical methods for extracting benzene and toluene and converting them into nitro compounds and amines. Hofmann's discoveries include formaldehyde, hydrazobenzene, the isonitriles, and allyl alcohol. He prepared three ethylamines and tetraethylammonium compounds and established their structural relationship to ammonia.
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Erich Hückel
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Erich Armand Arthur Joseph Hückel was a German physicist and physical chemist. He is known for two major contributions:The Debye–Hückel theory of electrolytic solutionssThe Hückel method of approximate molecular orbital calculations on π electron systems.Hückel was born in the Charlottenburg suburb of Berlin. He studied physics and mathematics from 1914 to 1921 at the University of Göttingen.
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Antoine Lavoisier
1743 - 1794 (51 years)
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier , also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution, was a French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and who had a large influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology.
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John Dalton
1766 - 1844 (78 years)
John Dalton was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He introduced the atomic theory into chemistry. He also researched colour blindness, which he had; as a result, colour blindness is known as Daltonism in several languages.
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Jöns Jacob Berzelius
1779 - 1848 (69 years)
Baron Jöns Jacob Berzelius was a Swedish chemist. Berzelius is considered, along with Robert Boyle, John Dalton, and Antoine Lavoisier, to be one of the founders of modern chemistry. Berzelius became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1808 and served from 1818 as its principal functionary. He is known in Sweden as the "Father of Swedish Chemistry". Berzelius Day is celebrated on 20 August in honour of him.
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Louis Pasteur
1822 - 1895 (73 years)
Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the last of which was named after him. His research in chemistry led to remarkable breakthroughs in the understanding of the causes and preventions of diseases, which laid down the foundations of hygiene, public health and much of modern medicine. Pasteur's works are credited with saving millions of lives through the developments of vaccines for rabies and anthrax. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern bacteriology and has ...
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Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff
1852 - 1911 (59 years)
Jacobus Henricus "Henry" van 't Hoff Jr. was a Dutch physical chemist. A highly influential theoretical chemist of his time, van 't Hoff was the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His pioneering work helped found the modern theory of chemical affinity, chemical equilibrium, chemical kinetics, and chemical thermodynamics. In his 1874 pamphlet, van 't Hoff formulated the theory of the tetrahedral carbon atom and laid the foundations of stereochemistry. In 1875, he predicted the correct structures of allenes and cumulenes as well as their axial chirality. He is also widely considered ...
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Michael Faraday
1791 - 1867 (76 years)
Michael Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. Although Faraday received little formal education, as a self-made man, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. It was by his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a direct current that Faraday established the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics. Faraday also established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship between the two phenomena.
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William Crookes
1832 - 1919 (87 years)
Sir William Crookes was a British chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College London, and worked on spectroscopy. He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube which was made in 1875. This was a foundational discovery that eventually changed the whole of chemistry and physics.
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August Kekulé
1829 - 1896 (67 years)
Friedrich August Kekulé, later Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz , was a German organic chemist. From the 1850s until his death, Kekulé was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in the field of theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure and in particular the Kekulé structure of benzene.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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