Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Chemistry,

#6351

Ethel Hurlbatt

1866 - 1934 (68 years)

Ethel Hurlbatt was Principal of Bedford College, University of London, and later Warden of Royal Victoria College, the women's college of McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which had opened in 1899.

#6352

Robert Bellamy Clifton

1836 - 1921 (85 years)

Robert Bellamy Clifton FRS was a British scientist. Academic career Clifton was educated at University College, London and St John's College, Cambridge where he studied under Sir George Stokes. In 1860 he went to Owens College, Manchester as Professor of Natural Philosophy. In 1865 he was appointed Professor of experimental Natural Philosophy at Oxford University. While at Oxford he designed Clarendon Laboratory and gave research space to Charles Vernon Boys. On 4 June 1868 he became a fellow of the Royal Society. He was president of the Physical Society from 1882 until 1884. From 1868 un...

#6353

W. R. Scott

1868 - 1940 (72 years)

William Robert Scott was a political economist who was Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow from 1915 to 1940. Career Born in Omagh, County Tyrone, on 31 August 1868, William Robert Scott was the son of Charles Scott, JP, of Lisnamallard in Omagh. He attended Trinity College, Dublin; graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1889, Scott won the Wray Prize and was First Senior Moderator in Logics and Ethics. He proceeded to a Master of Arts degree two years later, and joined the University of St Andrews in 1896 as assistant to the Professor of Moral Philosophy .

#6354

Chi Che Wang

1894 - 1979 (85 years)

Chi Che Wang , also known as Wang Chi-Lian, was a Chinese biochemist and college professor. Wang was one of the first Chinese women to make a career in American higher education and scientific research.

#6355

Elof Hellquist

1864 - 1933 (69 years)

Gustaf Elof Hellquist was a Swedish linguist. He was professor of Nordic languages at Lund University between 1914 and 1929 and authored the standard work Swedish Etymological Dictionary. Biography Elof Hellquist was born on 26 June 1864 in Norrköping and took his matriculation examination there in 1883. He became Doctor of Philosophy in Uppsala in 1890 and worked as docent of Nordic languages and adjunct at a grammar school. Between the years 1894 and 1903 he was an editor of Svenska Akademiens ordbok. He became lecturer of Swedish and German at Lund in 1898 until he went over to Gothenburg in 1903 with the same title, in addition to again serving as docent.

#6356

Gopinath Kartha

1927 - 1984 (57 years)

Gopinath Kartha was a prominent crystallographer of Indian origin. In 1967, he determined the molecular structure of the enzyme ribonuclease. This was the first protein structure elucidated and published in the United States.

#6357

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.

#6358

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.

#6359

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.

#6360

J. A. F. Rook

1926 - 1987 (61 years)

John Allan Fynes Rook CBE FRSE FIB FRIC was a 20th-century British chemist connected to the British dairy industry. He was President of the British Society of Animal Production 1982/83. Life He was born on 1 May 1926 the son of Edward Fynes Rook, near Scarborough in North Yorkshire. He was educated at Scarborough High School for Boys, then studied Chemistry at the University of Wales graduating BSc in 1947. He then won an Agricultural Research Council scholarship to do further postgraduate studies.

#6361

Jakob Meisenheimer

Jakob Meisenheimer

1876 - 1934 (58 years)

Jakob Meisenheimer was a German chemist. He made numerous contributions to organic chemistry, the most famous being his proposed structure for a group of compounds now named Meisenheimer complex. He also proposed the mechanism of the Beckmann rearrangement. Later in his career, he reported the synthesis of the pyridine-N-oxide.

#6362

William Mansfield Clark

William Mansfield Clark

1884 - 1964 (80 years)

William Mansfield Clark was an American chemist and professor at the Johns Hopkins University. He studied oxidation-reduction reactions and was a pioneer of medical biochemistry. Clark was born in Tivoli, New York, in a clergy family and studied at Hotchkiss School and Williams College before entering Johns Hopkins University, where he received a PhD in chemistry under H.N. Morse with a dissertation on A contribution to the investigation of the temperature coefficient of osmotic pressure: a redetermination of the osmotic pressures of cane sugar at 20°. He then worked on dairy bacteriology in ...

#6363

Barnet Woolf

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Barnet Woolf FRSE was a 20th-century British scientist, whose disciplines had a broad scope. He made lasting contributions to biochemistry, genetics, epidemiology, nutrition, public health, statistics, and computer science. His name appears in the Hanes-Woolf plot: a mathematical plotting of chemical reaction times.

#6364

Roscoe G. Dickinson

1894 - 1945 (51 years)

Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson was an American chemist, known primarily for his work on X-ray crystallography. As professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology , he was the doctoral advisor of Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and of Arnold O. Beckman, inventor of the pH meter.

#6365

Raymond Thayer Birge

1887 - 1980 (93 years)

Raymond Thayer Birge was an American physicist. Career Born in Brooklyn, New York, into an academic scientific family, Birge obtained his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1913. In the same year he married Irene A. Walsh. The Birges had two children, Carolyn Elizabeth and Robert Walsh, Associate Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1973-1981. After five years as an instructor at Syracuse University, he became a member of the physics department at University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until he retired, as chairman, in 1955.

#6366

Evert Verwey

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

Evert Johannes Willem Verwey, also Verweij, was a Dutch chemist, who also did research in physical chemistry. Verwey studied chemistry at the University of Amsterdam and obtained his MSc in 1929. From 1931 he worked as an assistant at the University of Groningen, where he obtained his PhD under the guidance of Hugo Rudolph Kruyt . In 1934 he moved to the Philips Laboratories in Eindhoven. He continued work on colloids, which was also the topic of his dissertation, and on oxides. The Verwey transition in magnetite is named after him.

#6367

Jerry Donohue

1920 - 1985 (65 years)

Jerry Donohue was an American theoretical and physical chemist. He is best remembered for steering James D. Watson and Francis Crick towards the correct structure of DNA with some crucial information.

#6368

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.

#6369

Frederick George Mann

1897 - 1982 (85 years)

Frederick George Mann was a British organic chemist. Academic career He completed his doctoral studies at Downing College, Cambridge under Sir William Pope, graduating in 1923. He continued at Downing as an assistant lecturer until 1930, when he was appointed to a lectureship at Trinity College. He spent his entire academic career at Cambridge, retiring in 1964.

#6370

A. D. Walsh

1916 - 1977 (61 years)

Arthur Donald Walsh FRS FRSE FRIC was a British chemist, who served as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Dundee. He is usually referred to as Donald Walsh. He was the creator of the Walsh diagram and Walsh's Rules.

#6371

Paul L. Kirk

1902 - 1970 (68 years)

Paul Leland Kirk was a biochemist, criminalist and participant in the Manhattan Project who was specialized in microscopy. He also investigated the bedroom in which Sam Sheppard supposedly murdered his wife and provided the key blood spatter evidence that led to his acquittal in a retrial over 12 years after the murder. The highest honor one can receive in the criminalistics section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences carries Kirk's name.

#6372

Philip J. Elving

1913 - 1984 (71 years)

Philip Juliber Elving was a chemist who served on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and most notably the University of Michigan, where he was the Hobart Willard Professor of Chemistry. He retired from Michigan, assuming professor emeritus status, in 1983. His research was primarily in analytical chemistry, a subject he also taught for many years at Michigan. Along with I. M. Kolthoff and J. D. Winefordner, he co-edited two popular series of monographs on analytical chemistry.

#6373

Hans Erlenmeyer

1900 - 1967 (67 years)

Hans Friedrich Albrecht Erlenmeyer was a German-Swiss chemist and collector of antiquities. He was a professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Basel. Life and career Hans Erlenmeyer came from a family of chemists; his grandfather Emil Erlenmeyer and his father Emil Erlenmeyer Jr. were both chemistry professors. Erlenmeyer studied chemistry from 1918 to 1922 at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1922 with a thesis entitled "On Asymmetric Synthesis". He worked as an assistant to Bernhard Lepsius. In 192...

#6374

Otto Redlich

1896 - 1978 (82 years)

Otto Redlich was an Austrian physical chemist who is best known for his development of equations of state like Redlich-Kwong equation. Besides this he had numerous other contributions to science. He won the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1932.

#6375

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.

#6376

James William McBain

1882 - 1953 (71 years)

James William McBain FRS was a Canadiann chemist. He gained a Master of Arts at Toronto University and a Doctor of Science at Heidelberg University. He carried out pioneering work in the area of micelles at the University of Bristol. As early as 1913 he postulated the existence of "colloidal ions", now known as micelles, to explain the good electrolytic conductivity of sodium palmitate solutions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 1923 He won their Davy Medal in 1939.

#6377

Hugh Stott Taylor

1890 - 1974 (84 years)

Sir Hugh Stott Taylor was an English chemist primarily interested in catalysis. In 1925, in a landmark contribution to catalytic theory, Taylor suggested that a catalysed chemical reaction is not catalysed over the entire solid surface of the catalyst but only at certain 'active sites' or centres. He also developed important methods for procuring heavy water during World War II and pioneered the use of stable isotopes in studying chemical reactions.

#6378

James B. Sumner

James B. Sumner

1887 - 1955 (68 years)

James Batcheller Sumner was an American biochemist. He discovered that enzymes can be crystallized, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 with John Howard Northrop and Wendell Meredith Stanley. He was also the first to prove that enzymes are proteins.

#6379

Joseph Edward Mayer

1904 - 1983 (79 years)

Joseph Edward Mayer was a chemist who formulated the Mayer expansion in statistical field theory. He was professor of chemistry at the University of California San Diego from 1960 to 1972, and previously at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He was married to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer from 1930 until her death in 1972. He went to work with James Franck in Göttingen, Germany in 1929, where he met Maria, a student of Max Born. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and the American Philosophical Society .

#6380

William Giauque

William Giauque

1895 - 1982 (87 years)

William Francis Giauque was a Canadian-born American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized in 1949 for his studies in the properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero. He spent virtually all of his educational and professional career at the University of California, Berkeley.

#6381

Frederick Rossini

1899 - 1990 (91 years)

Frederick Dominic Rossini was an American thermodynamicist noted for his work in chemical thermodynamics. In 1920, at the age of twenty-one, Rossini entered Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and soon was awarded a full-time teaching scholarship. He graduated with a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1925, followed by an M.S. degree in science in physical chemistry in 1926.

#6382

George C. Pimentel

1922 - 1989 (67 years)

George Claude Pimentel was a preeminent chemist and researcher. He was also dedicated to science education and public service. the inventor of the chemical laser. He developed the technique of matrix isolation in low-temperature chemistry. He also developed time-resolved infrared spectroscopy to study radicals and other transient species. In the late 1960s, Pimentel led the University of California team that designed the infrared spectrometer for the Mars Mariner 6 and 7 missions that analyzed the surface and atmosphere of Mars.

#6383

Peter Debye

1884 - 1966 (82 years)

Peter Joseph William Debye was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. Biography Early life Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, Debye enrolled in the Aachen University of Technology in 1901. In 1905, he completed his first degree in electrical engineering. He published his first paper, a mathematically elegant solution of a problem involving eddy currents, in 1907. At Aachen, he studied under the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who later claimed that his most important discovery was Peter Debye.

#6384

R. Norris Shreve

1885 - 1975 (90 years)

Randolph Norris Shreve was a chemical engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, educator and collector. After joining the Purdue University faculty in 1930, he helped to build the university's School of Chemical Engineering, the Purdue-Taiwan Engineering Project, and National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. He and his wife Eleanor are the namesakes of the Shreve Professorship of Organic Technology and Shreve Residence Hall at Purdue, and Shreve Hall on the Cheng Kung University campus. He is the namesake of the Norris Shreve Award for Outstanding Teaching in Chemical Engineering.

#6385

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.

#6386

Yakov Zeldovich

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.

#6387

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.

#6388

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...

#6389

Richard H. Wilhelm

1909 - 1968 (59 years)

Richard Herman Wilhelm was an American chemical engineer notable for developing a new method of fluid separation called chemical parametric pumping. Wilhelm was also notable for pioneering in the development of fluid beds, which according to Princeton University "revolutionized the petroleum-cracking process". Princeton University established Wilhelm Lectures in his honor. Wilhelm was a member of the National Academy of Engineering Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a chairman of the department of chemical engineering at Princeton University. Princeton University cal...

#6390

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...

#6391

Morris S. Kharasch

1895 - 1957 (62 years)

Morris Selig Kharasch was a pioneering organic chemist best known for his work with free radical additions and polymerizations. He defined the peroxide effect, explaining how an anti-Markovnikov orientation could be achieved via free radical addition. Kharasch was born in the Russian Empire in 1895 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 13. In 1919, he completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Chicago and spent most of his professional career there.

#6392

Takeru Higuchi

1918 - 1987 (69 years)

Takeru Higuchi was an American chemist who was widely known as "the father of physical pharmacy". He invented the time-release medication capsule, which would release medicine slowly into the bloodstream.

#6393

Gustavs Vanags

1891 - 1965 (74 years)

Gustavs Vanags was a Soviet and Latvian organic chemist, full member of Latvian SSR Academy of Sciences. He was also one of the signers of the Memorandum of Latvian Central Council in 1944. Biography Gustavs Vanags was born in "Rungas" house of the Schnicken manor . He received primary education in the Mitau Classic Gymnasium, and in 1910 enrolled Riga Polytechnic Institute. During the First World War, he, among many, went in evacuation to the inner regions of Russian Empire; after returning from it in 1921, he completed his education in the new-founded University of Latvia and worked at the Faculty of Chemistry, raising to the position of the chair of the Department of organic chemistry.

#6394

Stephen Brunauer

1903 - 1986 (83 years)

Stephen Brunauer was an American research chemist, government scientist, and university teacher. He resigned from his position with the U.S. Navy during the McCarthy era, when he found it impossible to refute anonymous charges that he was disloyal to the U.S.

#6395

Steven Kistler

1900 - 1975 (75 years)

Samuel Stephens Kistler was an American scientist and chemical engineer, best known as the inventor of aerogels, one of the lightest known solid materials. Biography Kistler, the son of a shopkeeper, was born in the small town of Cedarville in the far northeastern corner of California. The family moved to the larger Santa Rosa when Kistler was 12, where he first became interested in chemistry. When he entered the College of the Pacific in 1917, however, his plan was to learn to play the cello, then pursue a degree in agriculture. Instead, he ended up taking every science course available, and after three years he moved to Stanford University and obtained a B.A.

#6396

John Llewellyn

1915 - 1988 (73 years)

Sir Frederick John Llewellyn KCMG was an English chemist and academic administrator who spent some of his career in New Zealand. Biography Llewellyn was born in 1915. His father was Ernest Barrett Llewellyn. He received his education at Dursley Grammar School. He attended the University of Birmingham, from where he graduated with a BSc . At the same university, he received a PhD and a DSc.

#6397

William Houlder Zachariasen

1906 - 1980 (74 years)

William Houlder Zachariasen , more often known as W. H. Zachariasen, was a Norwegian-American physicist, specializing in X-ray crystallography and famous for his work on the structure of glass. Background Zachariasen was born in Langesund at Bamble in Telemark, Norway. He entered the University of Oslo in 1923, where he studied in the Mineralogical Institute. Zachariasen published his first article in 1925 when he was 19 years old, after having presented the contents of the article to the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in the preceding year. Over a span of 55 years he published over 200 scientific papers, many of which he was the sole author.

#6398

Joel Henry Hildebrand

1881 - 1983 (102 years)

Joel Henry Hildebrand was an American educator and a pioneer chemist. He was a major figure in physical chemistry research specializing in liquids and nonelectrolyte solutions. Education and professorship He was born in Camden, New Jersey on November 16, 1881.

#6399

Mowbray Ritchie

1905 - 1966 (61 years)

Mowbray Ritchie FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish chemist and scientific author. He was a friend and colleague of Sir Edmund Hirst. Life Ritchie was born in Peebles on 5 October 1905, and was educated at Peebles High School. He studied chemistry at the University of Edinburgh graduating with a BSc in 1927. He then continued as a postgraduate gaining two doctorates . In 1932 Ritchie began working as a demonstrator at University chemistry lectures, and was promoted to lecturer in 1935.

#6400

Raymond Fuoss

1905 - 1987 (82 years)

Raymond Matthew Fuoss was an American chemist who researched mainly on electrolytes, polyelectrolytes, and polymers. He held Sterling Professor status at Yale University. Early life and education Fuoss was born to Jacob Z. Fuoss in 1905 and graduated from Altoona High School.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions