The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#6351
William Prout
1785 - 1850 (65 years)
William Prout FRS was an English chemist, physician, and natural theologian. He is remembered today mainly for what is called Prout's hypothesis. Biography Prout was born in Horton, Gloucestershire in 1785 and educated at 17 years of age by a clergyman, followed by the Redland Academy at Bristol and Edinburgh University, where he graduated in 1811 with an MD. His professional life was spent as a practising physician in London, but he also occupied himself with chemical research. He was an active worker in biological chemistry and carried out many analyses of the secretions of living organisms, which he believed were produced by the breakdown of bodily tissues.
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Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac
1817 - 1894 (77 years)
Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac was a Swiss chemist whose work with atomic weights suggested the possibility of isotopes and the packing fraction of nuclei. His study of the rare earth elements led to his discovery of ytterbium in 1878 and co-discovery of gadolinium in 1880.
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Odd Hassel
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Odd Hassel was a Norwegian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate. Biography Hassel was born in Kristiania , Norway. His parents were Ernst Hassel , a gynaecologist, and Mathilde Klaveness . In 1915, he entered the University of Oslo where he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry, and graduated in 1920. Victor Goldschmidt was Hassel's tutor when he began studies in Oslo, while Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt, Victor's father, was Hassel's thesis advisor. Father and son were important figures in Hassel's life and they remained friends. After taking a year off from studying, he went to Munich, Ger...
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Theodor Curtius
1857 - 1928 (71 years)
Geheimrat Julius Wilhelm Theodor Curtius was professor of Chemistry at Heidelberg University and elsewhere. He published the Curtius rearrangement in 1890/1894 and also discovered diazoacetic acid, hydrazine and hydrazoic acid.In 1882 he carried out the first ever peptide synthesis, creating the N-protected dipeptide, benzoylglycylglycine
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Antoine Jérôme Balard
1802 - 1876 (74 years)
Antoine Jérôme Balard was a French chemist and one of the discoverers of bromine Career Born at Montpellier, France, on 30 September 1802, he started as an apothecary, but taking up teaching he acted as chemical assistant at the faculty of sciences of his native town, and then became professor of chemistry at the royal college and school of pharmacy and at the faculty of sciences. In 1826 he discovered in seawater a substance which he recognized as a previously unknown element and named it bromine. It had been independently prepared by Carl Jacob Löwig the previous year and the two are both r...
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Paul Walden
1863 - 1957 (94 years)
Paul Walden was a Russian, Latvian and German chemist known for his work in stereochemistry and history of chemistry. In particular, he discovered the Walden rule, he invented the stereochemical reaction known as Walden inversion and synthesized the first room-temperature ionic liquid, ethylammonium nitrate.
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Leopold Ružička
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
Leopold Ružička was a Croatian-Swiss scientist and joint winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on polymethylenes and higher terpenes" "including the first chemical synthesis of male sex hormones." He worked most of his life in Switzerland, and received eight doctorates honoris causa in science, medicine, and law; seven prizes and medals; and twenty-four honorary memberships in chemical, biochemical, and other scientific societies.
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John Lennard-Jones
1894 - 1954 (60 years)
Sir John Edward Lennard-Jones was a British mathematician and professor of theoretical physics at the University of Bristol, and then of theoretical science at the University of Cambridge. He was an important pioneer in the development of modern computational chemistry and theoretical chemistry.
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Richard Adolf Zsigmondy
1865 - 1929 (64 years)
Richard Adolf Zsigmondy was an Austrian-born chemist. He was known for his research in colloids, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1925, as well as for co-inventing the slit-ultramicroscope, and different membrane filters. The crater Zsigmondy on the Moon is named in his honour.
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Otto Diels
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Otto Paul Hermann Diels was a German chemist. His most notable work was done with Kurt Alder on the Diels–Alder reaction, a method for diene synthesis. The pair was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1950 for their work. Their method of synthesizing cyclic organic compounds proved valuable for the manufacture of synthetic rubber and plastic. He completed his education at the University of Berlin, where he later worked. Diels was employed at the University of Kiel when he completed his Nobel Prize–winning work, and remained there until he retired in 1945. Diels was married, with five children.
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James Dewar
1842 - 1923 (81 years)
Sir James Dewar was a British chemist and physicist. He is best known for his invention of the vacuum flask, which he used in conjunction with research into the liquefaction of gases. He also studied atomic and molecular spectroscopy, working in these fields for more than 25 years.
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Jabir ibn Hayyan
721 - 815 (94 years)
Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān , died 806−816, is the purported author of an enormous number and variety of works in Arabic, often called the Jabirian corpus. The works that survive today mainly deal with alchemy and chemistry, magic, and Shi'ite religious philosophy. However, the original scope of the corpus was vast and diverse, covering a wide range of topics ranging from cosmology, astronomy and astrology, over medicine, pharmacology, zoology and botany, to metaphysics, logic, and grammar.
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Otto Ruff
1871 - 1939 (68 years)
Otto Ruff was a German chemist. Life Otto Ruff was born in Schwäbisch Hall, Württemberg. After becoming a pharmacist under the supervision of Carl Magnus von Hell at the University of Stuttgart he joined the group of Hermann Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin. Fischer was noted for his work on carbohydrates and so Ruff started his career as an organic chemist. In 1898 he published his work on the transformation of d-Glucose to d-Arabinose, later called the Ruff degradation.
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Otto Wallach
1847 - 1931 (84 years)
Otto Wallach was a German chemist and recipient of the 1910 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on alicyclic compounds. Biography Wallach was born in Königsberg, the son of a Prussian civil servant. His father, Gerhard Wallach, descended from a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism. His mother, Otillie , was an ethnic German of Protestant religion. Wallach's father was transferred to Stettin and later to Potsdam. Otto Wallach went to school, a Gymnasium, in Potsdam, where he learned about literature and the history of art, two subjects he was interested his whole life. At this ti...
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Hermann von Fehling
1812 - 1885 (73 years)
Hermann von Fehling was a German chemist, famous as the developer of Fehling's solution used for estimation of sugar. Biography Hermann von Fehling was born in Lübeck. With the intention of taking up pharmacy he entered Heidelberg University about 1835. After graduating he went to Gießen as preparateur to Justus von Liebig, with whom he elucidated the composition of paraldehyde and metaldehyde. In 1839, on Liebig's recommendation, he was appointed to the chair of chemistry in the polytechnic in Stuttgart, a position he held for over 45 years. He died in Stuttgart in 1885.
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Frank R. Mayo
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Frank R. Mayo was a research chemist who worked for a variety of companies and won the 1967 Award in Polymer Chemistry from the American Chemical Society due to his work on the Mayo–Lewis equation.
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Franz von Soxhlet
1848 - 1926 (78 years)
Franz Ritter von Soxhlet was a German agricultural chemist. Biography Franz von Soxhlet was born on 12 January 1848 in Brno, Austrian Empire. He invented the Soxhlet extractor in 1879 and in 1886 he proposed pasteurization be applied to milk and other beverages. Soxhlet is also known as the first scientist who fractionated the milk proteins in casein, albumin, globulin and lactoprotein. Furthermore, he described for the first time the sugar present in milk, lactose. The Soxhlet solution is an alternative to Fehling's solution for preparation of a comparable cupric/tartrate reagent to test for...
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Friedrich Oskar Giesel
1852 - 1927 (75 years)
Friedrich Oskar Giesel was a German organic chemist. During his work in a quinine factory in the late 1890s, he started to work on the at-that-time-new field of radiochemistry and started the production of radium. In the period between 1902 and 1904, he was able to isolate a new element emanium. In a now controversially reviewed process, it was stated that emanium is identical to actinium, which was discovered by André-Louis Debierne in 1899.
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Torbern Bergman
1735 - 1784 (49 years)
Torbern Olaf Bergman was a Swedish chemist and mineralogist noted for his 1775 Dissertation on Elective Attractions, containing the largest chemical affinity tables ever published. Bergman was the first chemist to use the A, B, C, etc., system of notation for chemical species.
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Georg Ludwig Carius
1829 - 1875 (46 years)
Georg Ludwig Carius was a German chemist born in Barbis, in the Kingdom of Hanover. He studied under Friedrich Wöhler and was assistant to Robert Bunsen for 6 years. He was Director of the Marburger Chemical Institute of Philipps University of Marburg from 1865. He is noted for the studies of oxidation for which he developed a method involving high temperature digestion in a sealed tube. Heavy wall sealed tubes, as used for digestion or thermolysis, are referred to as "Carius tubes". He also wrote a textbook on polybasic acids.
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Sima Lozanić
1847 - 1935 (88 years)
Simeon Milivoje Lozanić and Simeon "Sima" Lozanić was a Serbian chemist, president of the Serbian Royal Academy, the first rector of the University of Belgrade, minister of foreign affairs, minister of industry and diplomat. At the Grandes écoles and later when it transformed into the University of Belgrade he taught chemistry and electrosynthesis. He has published over 200 scientific papers and professional publications.
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Johannes Thiele
1865 - 1918 (53 years)
Friedrich Karl Johannes Thiele was a German chemist and a prominent professor at several universities, including those in Munich and Strasbourg. He developed many laboratory techniques related to isolation of organic compounds. In 1907 he described a device for the accurate determination of melting points, since named Thiele tube after him.
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Louis Daguerre
1787 - 1851 (64 years)
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter, scenic designer, and a developer of the diorama theatre.
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Friedrich Paneth
1887 - 1958 (71 years)
Friedrich Adolf Paneth was an Austrian-born British chemist. Fleeing the Nazis, he escaped to Britain. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1939. After the war, Paneth returned to Germany to become director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in 1953. He was considered the greatest authority of his time on volatile hydrides and also made important contributions to the study of the stratosphere.
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John Herschel
1792 - 1871 (79 years)
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet was an English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, and experimental photographer who invented the blueprint and did botanical work.
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Carl Wagner
1901 - 1977 (76 years)
Carl Wilhelm Wagner was a German Physical chemist. He is best known for his pioneering work on Solid-state chemistry, where his work on oxidation rate theory, counter diffusion of ions and defect chemistry led to a better understanding of how reactions take place at the atomic level. His life and achievements were honoured in a Solid State Ionics symposium commemorating his 100th birthday in 2001, where he was described as the Father of Solid State Chemistry.
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Samuel Glasstone
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Samuel Glasstone was a British-born American academic and writer of scientific books. He authored over 40 popular textbooks on physical chemistry and electrochemistry, reaction rates, nuclear weapons effects, nuclear reactor engineering, Mars, space sciences, the environmental effects of nuclear energy and nuclear testing.
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Wilhelm Schlenk
1879 - 1943 (64 years)
Wilhelm Johann Schlenk was a German chemist. He was born in Munich and also studied chemistry there. Schlenk succeeded Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin in 1919. Schlenk was an organic chemist who discovered organolithium compounds around 1917. He also investigated free radicals and carbanions and discovered that organomagnesium halides are capable of participating in a complex chemical equilibrium, now known as a Schlenk equilibrium.
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John Gamble Kirkwood
1907 - 1959 (52 years)
John "Jack" Gamble Kirkwood was a noted chemist and physicist, holding faculty positions at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and Yale University. Early life and background Kirkwood was born in Gotebo, Oklahoma, the oldest child of John Millard and Lillian Gamble Kirkwood. His father was educated as an attorney and was a distributor for the Goodyear Corporation in the state of Kansas. In addition to Jack Kirkwood, there were two younger sisters: Caroline and Margaret .
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Saul Winstein
1912 - 1969 (57 years)
Saul Winstein was a Jewish Canadian chemist who discovered the Winstein reaction. He argued a non-classical cation was needed to explain the stability of the norbornyl cation. This fueled a debate with Herbert C. Brown over the existence of σ-delocalized carbocations. Winstein also first proposed the concept of an intimate ion pair. He was co-author of the Grunwald–Winstein equation, concerning solvolysis rates.
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Felix Hoppe-Seyler
1825 - 1895 (70 years)
Ernst Felix Immanuel Hoppe-Seyler was a German physiologist and chemist, and the principal founder of the disciplines of biochemistry and molecular biology. He had discovered Yeast nucleic acid which is now called RNA in his attempts to follow up and confirm Miescher's results by repeating parts of Miescher's experiments
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Ivan Kablukov
1857 - 1942 (85 years)
Ivan Alekseyevich Kablukov was a Russian and Soviet physical chemist. He simultaneously and independently of Vladimir Kistiakovsky proposed the idea of ion solvation and initiated the unification of the physical and chemical theory of solutions. He published influential textbooks on organic chemistry and was a professor at Moscow State University and Timiryazev Agricultural Academy.
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Frédéric Swarts
1866 - 1940 (74 years)
Frédéric Jean Edmond Swarts was a Belgian chemist who prepared the first chlorofluorocarbon, CF2Cl2 as well as several other related compounds. He was a professor in the civil engineering at the University of Ghent. In addition to his work on organofluorine chemistry, he authored the textbook "Cours de Chimie Organique." He was a son of Theodore Swarts and a colleague of Leo Baekeland.
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Jacob Volhard
1834 - 1910 (76 years)
Jacob Volhard was the German chemist who discovered, together with his student Hugo Erdmann, the Volhard–Erdmann cyclization reaction. He was also responsible for the improvement of the Hell–Volhard–Zelinsky halogenation.
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Herbert Freundlich
1880 - 1941 (61 years)
Herbert Max Finlay Freundlich was a German chemist. His father was of German Jewish descent, and his mother was from Scotland. His younger brother was Erwin Finlay Freundlich . He was a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry from 1919 until 1933, when the racial policies of the Nazi party demanded the dismissal of non-Aryans from senior posts. In 1934 he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Otto Hönigschmid
1878 - 1945 (67 years)
Otto Hönigschmid was a Czech/Austrian chemist. He published the first widely accepted experimental proof of isotopes along with Stefanie Horovitz. Throughout his career he worked to precisely define atomic weights for over 40 elements, and served on committees with the purpose of adopting internationally agreed upon values. After his home and laboratory in Munich were destroyed in World War II, he committed suicide in 1945.
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Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt, also Heinrich Jakob Goldschmidt , was a Jewish Austrian chemist who spent most of his career working in Norway. He studied chemistry at the Charles University in Prague, where he received his PhD in 1881. In the same year, he became professor at the ETH Zürich, where he worked with Victor Meyer. In 1888, his son Victor Goldschmidt was born; Victor later became a renowned mineralogist and founder of modern geochemistry. After working at the University of Amsterdam with Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff in 1894 and 1895, Heinrich Goldschmidt became full professor at the ETH.
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Max Trautz
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Max Trautz was a German chemist. He was very productive with over 190 scientific publications especially in the field of chemical kinetics. He was the first to investigate the activation energy of molecules by connecting Max Planck's new results concerning light with observations in chemistry.
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Maud Menten
1879 - 1960 (81 years)
Maud Leonora Menten was a Canadian physician and chemist. As a bio-medical and medical researcher, she made significant contributions to enzyme kinetics and histochemistry, and invented a procedure that remains in use. She is primarily known for her work with Leonor Michaelis on enzyme kinetics in 1913. The paper has been translated from its written language of German into English.
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Bohuslav Brauner
1855 - 1935 (80 years)
Bohuslav Brauner was a Czech chemist from the University of Prague, who investigated the properties of the rare earth elements, especially the determination of their atomic weights. Brauner predicted the existence of the rare earth element promethium ten years before the existence of the gap was confirmed experimentally . In the 1880s, when he already had started lecturing in Prague, he still competed internationally in cycling races.
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Franz Joseph Emil Fischer
1877 - 1947 (70 years)
Franz Joseph Emil Fischer was a German chemist. He was the founder and first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research. He is known for the discovery of the Fischer–Tropsch process.
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Fritz Ullmann
1875 - 1939 (64 years)
Fritz Ullmann was a German chemist. Ullmann was born in Fürth and started studying chemistry in Nuremberg, but received his PhD of the University of Geneva for work with Carl Gräbe in 1895. After some time in Geneva he went to Berlin in 1905. Ullmann taught technical chemistry during 1905-1913 and 1922-1925 at the Technischen Hochschule Berlin now Technische Universität Berlin, first as part of the ordinary teaching staff, later on as a professor. In 1900 he introduced dimethyl sulfate as an alkylating agent. Between 1914 and 1922, when he was back in Geneva, he published the first edition o...
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Merle Randall
1888 - 1950 (62 years)
Merle Randall was an American physical chemist famous for his work with Gilbert N. Lewis, over a period of 25 years, in measuring reaction heat of chemical compounds and determining their corresponding free energy. Together, their 1923 textbook "Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances" became a classic work in the field of chemical thermodynamics.
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Frank Wigglesworth Clarke
1847 - 1931 (84 years)
Frank Wigglesworth Clarke of Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. was an American scientist and chemist. Sometimes known as the "Father of Geochemistry," Clarke is credited with determining the composition of the Earth's crust. He was a founder of The American Chemical Society and served as its President, 1901.
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Jocelyn Field Thorpe
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Sir Jocelyn Field Thorpe FRS was a British chemist who made major contributions to organic chemistry, including the Thorpe-Ingold effect and three named reactions. Early life and education Thorpe was born in Clapham, London on 1 December 1872, one of nine children and the sixth son, of Mr. and Mrs. W.G. Thorpe of the Middle Temple. He attended Worthing College, and then from 1888 - 1890 studied engineering at King's College, London. He then moved to the Royal College of Science from 1890 - 1892 to study chemistry. He earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry under Karl von Auwers at Heidelberg University in 1895.
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Ira Remsen
1846 - 1927 (81 years)
Ira Remsen was an American chemist who discovered the artificial sweetener saccharin along with Constantin Fahlberg. He was the second president of Johns Hopkins University. He was the founder of the American Chemical Journal, which he edited from 1879 to 1914.
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Nikolai Kischner
1867 - 1935 (68 years)
Nikolai Matveyevich Kischner was a Russian chemist and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Biography After graduating from the Moscow Classical Gymnasium in 1886 Kischner enrolled to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University. Since 1889 he focused on organic chemistry, studying under Vladimir Luginin and Vladimir Markovnikov. In 1890, he completed his courses and started working on a PhD on "Amines and hydrazines of polymethylene series, methods of their preparation and transformation", which he defended in 1895. In 1900, he defended a habilitation on "The action of silver oxide and hydroxylamine on bromamines.
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Alicja Dorabialska
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Alicja Dorabialska , was a Polish chemist. Life Alicja Dorabialska was born in Sosnowiec, Vistula Land, Russian Empire on 14 October 1897. She graduated from a high school in Warsaw in 1914 and then enrolled in the Physical-Mathematical Department of the Moscow Higher Women's Courses the following year, graduating in 1918. Dorabialska received her Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw in 1922 and studied under Marie Curie at the Radium Institute, Paris in 1925. Dorabialska was an assistant in the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Warsaw University of Technology from 1918 to 1932. Two years lat...
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Hans Heinrich Landolt
1831 - 1910 (79 years)
Hans Heinrich Landolt was a Swiss chemist who discovered iodine clock reaction. He is also one of the founders of Landolt–Börnstein database. He tested law of mass conservation which was given by Lavoisier.
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Gustaf Erik Pasch
1788 - 1862 (74 years)
Gustaf Erik Pasch was a Swedish inventor and professor of chemistry at Karolinska institute in Stockholm and inventor of the safety match. He was born in Norrköping, the son of a carpenter. He enrolled at Uppsala University in 1806 and graduated with a master's degree in 1821. Pasch is mostly known for the safety match, but he was also involved with making waterproof concrete for the Göta Canal, manufacture of bank notes and growing of silk worms. He married Augusta Fredrika Vilhelmina Berg in 1827.
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