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.
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#6251
Anton Vilsmeier
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Dr. Anton Vilsmeier was a German chemist who together with Albrecht Haack discovered the Vilsmeier-Haack reaction. Early life Anton Vilsmeier was born to the mill owner, Wolfgang Vilsmeier, and his wife, Philomena, in Burgweinting, Oberpfalz. He attended the Volksschule and the Altes Gymnasium in Regensburg. During World War I, he served in the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, and became a British prisoner following the Battle of the Somme, returning to Germany in November 1919. From 1920, he studied chemistry at the University of Munich, and from 1922 at the University of Erlangen, where he ...
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S. P. L. Sørensen
1868 - 1939 (71 years)
Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen was a Danish chemist, known for the introduction of the concept of pH, a scale for measuring acidity and alkalinity. Personal life Sørensen was born in Havrebjerg Denmark in 1868 as the son of a farmer. He began his studies at the University of Copenhagen at the age of 18. He wanted to make a career in medicine, but under the influence of chemist Sophus Mads Jørgensen decided to change to chemistry.
Go to Profile#6253
Hans Fischer
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Hans Fischer was a German organic chemist and the recipient of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Chemistry "for his researches into the constitution of haemin and chlorophyll and especially for his synthesis of haemin."
Go to Profile#6254
Alexander Smith
1865 - 1922 (57 years)
Prof Alexander Smith FRSE LLD was a Scottish chemist, who spent his working life teaching in the universities of America. Biography He was born at 4 Nelson Street in Edinburgh's New Town, the son of Isabella and Alexander W. Smith, a music teacher. His paternal grandfather was the sculptor Alexander Smith. The family moved to 4 West Castle Road in the Merchiston district while he was young.
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Ernst Føyn
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Johan Ernst Fredrik Føyn was a Norwegian chemist and oceanographer. He was born in Kristiania. He was assigned professor of oceanography at the University of Oslo from 1964. His research centered on radioactivity of ocean waters, and on pollution of the oceans. He designed a method for electrolytic cleaning of sewage.
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Eugen Chirnoagă
1891 - 1965 (74 years)
Eugen Chirnoagă was a Romanian chemist. Chirnoagă was born in 1891 in Poduri, Bacău County, one of eight children of Gheorghe Chirnoagă, a teacher, and his wife, Olimpia; one of his brothers, Platon Chirnoagă, became a general in World War II.
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Marie Curie
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie , known simply as Marie Curie , was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. Her husband, Pierre Curie, was a co-winner of her first Nobel Prize, making them the first-ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University o...
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Herman Schlundt
1869 - 1937 (68 years)
Herman Schlundt was a physical chemist from the United States. He is most well known for extracting and refining radioactive metals from low-grade ore and industrial waste during his time as a researcher, which have had modern implications. Two buildings were named in his honor on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Missouri.
Go to Profile#6259
Nellie May Naylor
1885 - 1992 (107 years)
Nellie May Naylor was an American chemist. She was a chemistry professor at Iowa State University , teaching between 1908 until 1955. She was only the second woman to hold this job in the chemistry department.
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Eric Rideal
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Sir Eric Keightley Rideal, was a British physical chemist. He worked on a wide range of subjects, including electrochemistry, chemical kinetics, catalysis, electrophoresis, colloids and surface chemistry. He is best known for the Eley–Rideal mechanism, which he proposed in 1938 with Daniel D. Eley. He is also known for the textbook that he authored, An Introduction to Surface Chemistry , and was awarded honours for the research he carried out during both World Wars and for his services to chemistry.
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Frank Gibbs Torto
1921 - 1984 (63 years)
Frank Gibbs Tetteh O'Baka Torto, FGA, MV was a Ghanaian chemist and a professor at the University of Ghana. He was a founding member, vice president and later president of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Masuzo Shikata
1895 - 1964 (69 years)
was a Japanese chemist and one of the pioneers in electrochemistry. Together with his mentor and colleague, Czech chemist and inventor Jaroslav Heyrovský, he developed the first polarograph, a type of electrochemical analyzing machine, and co-authored the paper which introduced the machine and the name "polarograph". This machine was important because it automated the measurement of I-V curves of solutions, which when done by hand could take over an hour for each test.
Go to Profile#6263
Ahmed Mumin Warfa
Ahmed Mumin Warfa was a Somali scientist specializing in botany, who with his colleague Mats Thulin discovered Cyclamen somalense. He served as president of the Zamzam University of Science and Technology from 2020 until his death.
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Werner Zerweck
1899 - 1965 (66 years)
Werner Zerweck was a German chemist, inventor and industrial leader, who served as CEO of the chemical and pharmaceutical company Cassella from 1953 to 1963. Under his leadership the company focused increasingly on pharmaceuticals and cosmetics rather than its former primary focus, dyes. He was also a member of the advisory board of Deutsche Bank from 1953. Zerweck was a pioneer in the development of synthetic fibers.
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Jack Linnett
1913 - 1975 (62 years)
John Wilfrid Linnett FRS was Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cambridge from 1973 to 1975. He was for many years a Fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford, and a demonstrator in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford.
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André-Louis Debierne
1874 - 1949 (75 years)
André-Louis Debierne was a French chemist. He is often considered the discoverer of the element actinium, though H. W. Kirby disputed this in 1971 and gave credit instead to German chemist Friedrich Oskar Giesel.
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Konstanty Hrynakowski
1878 - 1938 (60 years)
Konstanty Hrynakowski was a Polish chemist. He studied natural sciences at the St. Vladimir University, branching into inorganic chemistry and mineralogy at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, and earning a degree in 1904.
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John Stuart Anderson
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
John Stuart Anderson FRS, FAA, was a British and Australian scientist who was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne and Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford. He was born in Islington, London, the son of a Scottish cabinet-maker, and attended school in the area but learned most of his chemistry at the Islington Public Library. His tertiary education was at the Northern Polytechnic Institute, Imperial College and the Royal College of Science, all in London.
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Jan Zawidzki
1866 - 1928 (62 years)
Jan Wiktor Tomasz Zawidzki was a Polish physical chemist and historian of chemistry. He researched mainly chemical kinetics, thermochemistry and autocatalysis. Zawidzki was a professor of the Akademia Rolnicza in Dublany , Jagiellonian University , University of Warsaw , rector of the University of Warsaw , member of the Academy of Learning , co-founder of the Polish Chemical Society and magazine Roczniki Chemii.
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Paul Kogerman
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Paul Nikolai Kogerman was an Estonian chemist and founder of modern research in oil shale. Paul Kogerman was born into a family of gas factory worker . He went to an elementary school in 1901–1904 and a town school in 1904–1908. After town school Kogerman earned a living by teaching in church manors near Tallinn. In 1913, he was graduated from the Alexander Gymnasium in Tallinn as an extern. Starting in 1913, he studied at the University of Tartu, graduating from its Department of Chemistry in 1918. In the Estonian War of Independence he fought in a unit of Tallinn teachers. In 1919–1920 he got a state scholarship to study at the Imperial College London.
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Joseph John Blackie
1894 - 1946 (52 years)
Joseph John Blackie FRSE FRIC was a Scottish research chemist. Life He was born in Duns, Berwickshire. During the First World War he served as a staff sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in Gallipoli, Egypt and France.
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Kuzma Andrianov
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Kuzma Andrianovich Andrianov was a Soviet and Russian chemist and professor of Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Hero of Socialist Labour . Biography Kuzma Andrianovich Andrianov was born on 28 December 1904 , 1904 in Kondrakovo village . In 1930 he graduated from Chemical Faculty of Moscow State University. From 1929 to 1954 he worked at the All-Russian Electrotechnical Institute. In 1930—1932 he taught at Moscow Tannery Institute, in 1933—1941 — at D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia, in 1941—1959 at MPEI .
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Arthur Lapworth
1872 - 1941 (69 years)
Arthur Lapworth FRS was a Scottish chemist. He was born in Galashiels, Scotland, the son of geologist Charles Lapworth, and educated at St Andrew's and King Edward VI Five Ways School, Birmingham. He graduated in chemistry from Mason College . From 1893 to 1895 he worked on a scholarship at City and Guilds of London Institute on the chemistry of camphor and the 3 mechanism of aromatic substitution.
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Alfred Walter Stewart
1880 - 1947 (67 years)
Alfred Walter Stewart was a British chemist and part-time novelist who wrote seventeen detective novels and a pioneering science fiction work between 1923 and 1947 under the pseudonym of JJ Connington. He created several fictional detectives, including Superintendent Ross and Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield.
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Bertram Steele
1870 - 1934 (64 years)
Bertram Dillon Steele FRS was an Australian scientist, foundation professor of chemistry at the University of Queensland . Early life Steele was born in Plymouth, England, the son of Samuel Madden Steele, a surgeon, and his wife Hariette Sarah, née Acock. Steele was educated at the Plymouth Grammar School; he then began an apprenticeship with his father. Steele migrated to Australia in 1889, where he qualified as a pharmaceutical chemist at the Victorian College of Pharmacy where he won a gold medal in 1890. He then practised as a pharmacist.
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T. Stephen Crawford
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
Thomas Stephen Crawford was an American chemical engineer known for his research in coal, coal tar and coal gasification. He was a long-serving dean of the college of engineering at the University of Rhode Island, and namesake of Crawford Hall at the university.
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George Cecil Jaffe
1880 - 1965 (85 years)
George Cecil Jaffe , received his doctorate in chemistry in 1903 from the University of Leipzig, where he studied under Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald. He worked briefly at Cambridge and then the Curie Laboratory, where he worked with both J.J. Thomson and Pierre Curie. He eventually rose to full professor at the University of Giessen, however, with the rise of Nazism he was dismissed from his position. He eventually immigrated to the US and became a professor at Louisiana State University.
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Dalziel Hammick
1887 - 1966 (79 years)
Dalziel Llewellyn Hammick FRS was an English research chemist. His major work was in synthetic organic chemistry. Along with Walter Illingworth he promulgated the Hammick-Illingworth rule, which predicts the order of substitution in benzene derivatives. He also developed the Hammick reaction which generates ortho-substituted pyridines.
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Mary Louise Fossler
1868 - 1952 (84 years)
Mary Louise Fossler was an American chemist and chemistry professor. Fossler is best known for her contributions to chemistry research and for her career as a professor at the University of Nebraska. Fossler graduated from the University of Nebraska with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry in 1894, and then returned to complete a Master of Arts in chemistry.
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Frank Curry Mathers
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Frank Curry Mathers , was an American physical chemist and university professor. He was president of the Electrochemical Society. Early life and education Mathers, son of Elizabeth Bonsall and John Thomas Mathers, was born in a one-room log cabin in Monroe County, Indiana, four miles south of Bloomington. He graduated from Bloomington High School in 1899. Mathers received the A.B. degree in chemistry from Indiana University in 1903. He joined the I.U. faculty as instructor of chemistry, while also doing graduate work in electroplating with Oliver W. Brown for the M.A. degree in 1905. Mathers was granted a leave of absence to work toward his 1907 Ph.D.
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Charles Frederick Burgess
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Charles Frederick Burgess was an American chemist and engineer. He was founder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison department of Chemical Engineering in 1905, and was a pioneer in the development of electrochemical engineering in the United States. In 1917 he founded the Burgess Battery Company.
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Julia Southard Lee
1897 - Present (129 years)
Julia Southard Lee was an American textile chemist known for her teaching positions and research on protein fibers and textile quality. Early life and education Lee was born in Southard, Missouri on September 29, 1897. She attended the University of Missouri for her undergraduate education and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1926. She then attended Kansas State University and earned her master's degree in 1929. For her doctorate, she attended the University of Chicago and graduated in 1936. While at the University of Chicago, she received a fellowship in home economics named after Ellen Swallow Richards.
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Joseph O. Hirschfelder
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project and in the creation of the nuclear bomb. Biography Hirschfelder was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a Jewish couple, Arthur Douglas and May Rosalie . He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota from 1927 to 1929 and at Yale University from 1929 to 1931. Hirschfelder received doctorates in physics and chemistry from Princeton University under the direction of Eugene Wigner, Henry Eyring and Hugh Stott Taylor. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with John von Neumann for a year after his PhD at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand
1826 - 1897 (71 years)
Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand was a Swedish mineralogist and chemist. He was a professor at the University of Lund from 1862-1895, where he isolated the element niobium in 1864. He developed an early version of the periodic table and made advances in understanding the chemistry of coordination compounds. Blomstrand published textbooks in chemistry and was well-known internationally for his scientific contributions.
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Francis Simon
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Sir Francis Simon , was a German and later British physical chemist and physicist who devised the gaseous diffusion method, and confirmed its feasibility, of separating the isotope Uranium-235 and thus made a major contribution to the creation of the atomic bomb.
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Primo Levi
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man , his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table , a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element as it played a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
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Abu Bakr al-Razi
866 - 925 (59 years)
Abū Bakr al-Rāzī , , often known as Razi or by his Latin name Rhazes, also rendered Rhasis, was a physician, philosopher and alchemist who lived during the Islamic Golden Age. He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of medicine, and also wrote on logic, astronomy and grammar. He is also known for his criticism of religion, especially with regard to the concepts of prophethood and revelation. However, the religio-philosophical aspects of his thought, which also included a belief in five "eternal principles", are only recorded by authors who were often hostile t...
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Charles F. Chandler
1836 - 1925 (89 years)
Charles Frederick Chandler was an American chemist, best known for his regulatory work in public health, sanitation, and consumer safety in New York City, as well as his work in chemical education—first at Union College and then, for the majority of his career, at Columbia University, where he taught in the Chemical Department, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and served as the first Dean of Columbia University's School of Mines.
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Otto Linné Erdmann
1804 - 1869 (65 years)
Otto Linné Erdmann was a German chemist. He was the son of Karl Gottfried Erdmann, the physician who introduced vaccination into Saxony. He was born in Dresden on 11 April 1804. In 1820 he began to attend the medico-chirurgical academy of his native place, and in 1822 he entered the University of Leipzig, where in 1827 he became an associate professor, and in 1830 a full professor of chemistry. This office he held until his death, which happened at Leipzig on 9 October 1869.
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Charles Loring Jackson
1845 - 1935 (90 years)
Charles Loring Jackson was the first significant organic chemist in the United States. He brought organic chemistry to the United States from Germany and educated a generation of American organic chemists.
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Theodor Förster
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Theodor Förster was a German physical chemist known for theoretical work on light-matter interaction in molecular systems such as fluorescence and resonant energy transfer. Education and career Förster studied at the University of Frankfurt and received his Ph.D. at the age of only 23 under Erwin Madelung in 1933. In the same year he joined the Nazi Party and the SA. He then joined Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer as a research assistant at the Leipzig University, where he worked closely with Peter Debye, Werner Heisenberg, and Hans Kautzky. Förster obtained his habilitation in 1940 and became a lecturer at the Leipzig University.
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Cornelis Adriaan Lobry van Troostenburg de Bruyn
1857 - 1904 (47 years)
Cornelis Adriaan Lobry van Troostenburg de Bruyn was a chemist from the Netherlands. Biography De Bruyn was born on in Leeuwarden, where his father, Nicholaas Lobry van Troostenburg de Bruyn, was a physician in practice. The boy was in due time sent to the high school of the town , and subsequently for a year to a gymnasium. In 1875, he entered the University of Leiden, and in 1883, while acting as assistant to Professor Franchimont, he produced his dissertation and obtained his doctorate. The subject of this thesis was the interaction of the three dinitrobenzenes with potassium cyanide in al...
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Ernest Fourneau
1872 - 1949 (77 years)
Ernest Fourneau was a French pharmacist who graduated in 1898 for the Paris university specialist in medicinal chemistry and pharmacology. He played a major role in the discovery of synthetic local anesthetics such as amylocaine, as well as in the synthesis of suramin. He authored more than two hundred scholarly works, and has been described as having "helped to establish the fundamental laws of chemotherapy that have saved so many human lives".
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Raluca Ripan
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Raluca Ripan was a Romanian chemist, and a titular member of the Romanian Academy. She wrote many treatises, especially in the field of analytical chemistry. Biography She was born in Iași, in the Moldavia region of Romania; her parents were Constantin and Smaranda Ripan, both originally from Huși. She attended the local girl's high school, after which she enrolled in the Faculty of Science of the University of Iași, graduating in 1919. For her graduate studies she went to the University of Cluj in Transylvania, obtaining her PhD in 1922 under the direction of Gheorghe Spacu, with thesis "Double amines corresponding to double sulphates in the magnesium series".
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Jan Czochralski
1885 - 1953 (68 years)
Jan Czochralski was a Polish chemist who invented the Czochralski method, which is used for growing single crystals and in the production of semiconductor wafers. It is still used in over 90 percent of all electronics in the world that use semiconductors. He is the most cited Polish scholar.
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Johann Wilhelm Ritter
1776 - 1810 (34 years)
Johann Wilhelm Ritter was a German chemist, physicist and philosopher. He was born in Samitz near Haynau in Silesia , and died in Munich. Life and work Johann Wilhelm Ritter's first involvement with science began when he was 14 years old. He became an apprentice to an apothecary in Liegnitz , and acquired a deep interest in chemistry. He began medicine studies at the University of Jena in 1796. A self-taught scientist, he made many experimental researches on chemistry, electricity and other fields.
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Johann Friedrich Gmelin
1748 - 1804 (56 years)
Johann Friedrich Gmelin was a German naturalist, chemist, botanist, entomologist, herpetologist, and malacologist. Education Johann Friedrich Gmelin was born as the eldest son of Philipp Friedrich Gmelin in 1748 in Tübingen. He studied medicine under his father at University of Tübingen and graduated with a Master's degree in 1768, with a thesis entitled: , defended under the presidency of Ferdinand Christoph Oetinger, whom he thanks with the words .
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Roland Scholl
1865 - 1945 (80 years)
Roland Heinrich Scholl was a Swiss chemist who taught at various European universities. Among his most notable achievements are the synthesis of coronene, the co-development of the Bally-Scholl synthesis, and various discoveries about polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
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Lawrence O. Brockway
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Lawrence Olin Brockway was a physical chemist who spent most of his career at the University of Michigan, where he developed early methods for electron diffraction. Early life and education Brockway was born on September 23, 1907, in Topeka, Kansas. He attended the University of Nebraska and received his B.S. in 1929 and his M.S. a year later. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology, where he was one of the first graduate students of Linus Pauling. He and Pauling were interested in the physics of interatomic interactions and focused their efforts on the structure of chalcopyri...
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Wilhelm Biltz
1877 - 1943 (66 years)
Wilhelm Biltz was a German chemist and scientific editor. In addition to his scholarly work, Biltz is noted for commanding the principal German tank involved in the first ever tank-on-tank battle in history at the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux.
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