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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,

#6401

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.

#6402

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.

#6403

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...

#6404

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...

#6405

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.

#6406

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.

#6407

Paul Harteck

1902 - 1985 (83 years)

Paul Karl Maria Harteck was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of aiding the Nazis in their nuclear weapons program and he was incarcerated at Farm Hall, an English house fitted with covert electronic listening devices, for six months.

#6408

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.

#6409

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.

#6410

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 .

#6411

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.

#6412

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.

#6413

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.

#6414

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.

#6415

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.

#6416

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...

#6417

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.

#6418

Robert Elderfield

Robert Elderfield

1904 - 1979 (75 years)

Robert Cooley Elderfield was an American chemist. He was born in Niagara Falls, New York, United States. He studied at the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, later at the University of Michigan receiving his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1930. He worked at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research from 1930 till 1936 when he changed to Columbia University. He was moved to University of Michigan in 1952.

#6419

Edmund Hirst

1898 - 1975 (77 years)

Sir Edmund Langley Hirst CBE FRS FRSE , was a British chemist. Life Hirst was born in Preston, Lancashire on 21 July 1898 the son of Elizabeth and Rev Sim Hirst a Baptist minister. He was educated in Burnley, Northgate Grammar School, Ipswich, Madras College in St Andrews, then studied chemistry at the University of St Andrews with a Carnegie Scholarship.

#6420

Hobart Hurd Willard

1881 - 1974 (93 years)

Hobart Hurd Willard was an analytical chemist and inorganic chemist who spent most of his career at the University of Michigan. He was known for his teaching skill and his authorship of widely used textbooks. His research interests were wide-ranging and involved the characterization of perchloric acid and periodic acid salts.

#6421

Edgar Steacie

1900 - 1962 (62 years)

Edgar William Richard Steacie was a Canadian physical chemist and president of the National Research Council of Canada from 1952 to 1962. Education Born in Montreal, Quebec, the only child of Richard Steacie and Alice Kate McWood, he studied a year at the Royal Military College of Canada. In 1923, he received his Bachelor of Science degree and his Ph.D. in 1926 from McGill University.

#6422

Victor Gold

1922 - 1985 (63 years)

Victor Gold FRS FRSC was a chemist who served on the faculty of King's College, London. Gold was born in Vienna, the son of lawyer Oscar Gold and his first wife, the former Emmy Kopperl. He was raised primarily by his mother. Gold arrived in England, at Croydon aerodrome, in the spring of 1938, aged 15. His entry to the UK had been arranged by his uncle Max Gold . He was sent, with a cousin, to Loughborough College to learn English and work in the engineering workshops .

#6423

Leon Lapidus

1924 - 1977 (53 years)

Leon Lapidus was an American chemist and chemical engineer, the chairman of the department of chemical engineering at Princeton University, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an author of over a 100 technical publications.

#6424

Abel Wolman

1892 - 1989 (97 years)

Abel Wolman was an American engineer, educator and pioneer of modern sanitary engineering. His professional career left impacts in academia, sanitary engineering research, environmental and public health services, engineering professional societies, and journal publications. Wolman is best known for his research with Linn Enslow in the chlorination of Baltimore's municipal water supply, which has contributed to the distribution of safe municipal water supplies globally.

#6425

Eugen Glueckauf

1906 - 1981 (75 years)

Eugen Glueckauf FRS was a German-born British expert on nuclear power. Biography Eugen Glückauf was born on 9 April 1906 in Eisenach, Germany, the son of Bruno Glückauf, a clothier, and Elsa Pretzfelder.

#6426

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.

#6427

Ulrich Hofmann

1903 - 1986 (83 years)

Ulrich Hofmann was a German chemist known for his study of clay minerals and the pioneering use of electron microscopes in the study of carbonaceous materials. Education and career Hofmann was born in Munich in 1903 and the son of the German chemist Karl Andreas Hofmann. He studied chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin and obtained a diploma in 1925. He went on to receive his doctorate in 1926 from his father with the work Glanzkohlenstoff und die Reihe des schwarzen kristallinen Kohlenstoffs . In 1931 he received habilitation on graphite oxide and then worked as a lecturer at the T...

#6428

Charles D. Coryell

Charles D. Coryell

1912 - 1971 (59 years)

Charles DuBois Coryell was an American chemist who was one of the discoverers of the element promethium. Coryell earned a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1935 as the student of Arthur A. Noyes. During the late 1930s he engaged in research on the structure of hemoglobin in association with Linus Pauling. He also taught at UCLA before 1942. In 1942 he accepted a job with the Manhattan Project, for which he was Chief of the Fission Products Section, both at the University of Chicago and at Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee . His group had responsibility for character...

#6429

Francis William Aston

Francis William Aston

1877 - 1945 (68 years)

Francis William Aston FRS was a British chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes in many non-radioactive elements and for his enunciation of the whole number rule. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

#6430

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin

1920 - 1958 (38 years)

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA , RNA , viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, Franklin's contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognized during her life, for which Franklin has been variously referred to as the "wronged heroine", the "dark lady of DNA", the "forgotten heroine", a "feminist icon", and the "Sylvia Plath of molecular biology".

#6431

Ludwig Audrieth

1901 - 1967 (66 years)

Ludwig Frederick Audrieth was a chemist, educator, and United States Army officer. He is known for his work on non-aqueous solvents. Early life Audrieth was born on February 23, 1901, in Vienna, Austria. He was brought to the United States in 1902 and naturalized as a citizen in 1912.

#6432

Ronald Sydney Nyholm

1917 - 1971 (54 years)

Sir Ronald Sydney Nyholm was an Australian chemist who was a leading figure in inorganic chemistry in the 1950s and 1960s. Education Born on 29 January 1917 as the fourth in a family of six children. Nyholm's father, Eric Edward Nyholm was a railway guard. Nyholm's paternal grandfather, Erik Nyholm was a coppersmith born in Nykarleby in the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, who migrated to Adelaide in 1873. Ronald Nyholm valued his Finnish roots and was particularly proud in his election in 1959 as Corresponding Member of the Finnish Chemical Society.

#6433

Wallace Carothers

Wallace Carothers

1896 - 1937 (41 years)

Wallace Hume Carothers was an American chemist, inventor, and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont, who was credited with the invention of nylon. Carothers was a group leader at the DuPont Experimental Station laboratory, near Wilmington, Delaware, where most polymer research was done. Carothers was an organic chemist who, in addition to first developing nylon, also helped lay the groundwork for neoprene. After receiving his Ph.D., he taught at several universities before he was hired by DuPont to work on fundamental research.

#6434

Fritz Arndt

1885 - 1969 (84 years)

Fritz Georg Arndt was a German chemist recognised for his contributions to synthetic methodology, who together with Bernd Eistert discovered the Arndt-Eistert synthesis. Life Fritz Arndt was born on 6 July 1885, in Hamburg but started his chemistry studies at the University of Geneva followed by the University of Bern and receiving his PhD from the University of Freiburg for his work with Ludwig Gattermann in 1908.

#6435

Vladimir Ipatieff

Vladimir Ipatieff

1867 - 1952 (85 years)

Vladimir Nikolayevich Ipatieff ; was a Russian and American chemist. His most important contributions are in the field of petroleum chemistry and catalysts. Life and career Born in Moscow, Ipatieff first studied artillery in the Mikhailovskaya Artillery Academy in Petersburg, then later studied chemistry in Russia with Alexei Yevgrafovich Favorskii and in Germany. The prominence of his extended family is illustrated by the fact that the July 17, 1918, extermination of Czar Nicholas Romanoff, the Empress and the rest of the royal family took place in the basement of a vacation house owned by the Ipatieff family in Ekaterinburg.

#6436

Frederick Soddy

Frederick Soddy

1877 - 1956 (79 years)

Frederick Soddy FRS was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements. In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes". Soddy was a polymath who mastered chemistry, nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, finance and economics.

#6437

Robert J. Linhardt

Robert J. Linhardt

Robert J. Linhardt is the Ann and John Broadbent, Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor Biocatalysis & Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His primary appointment at RPI is based in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, consisting of joint appointments with the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, Department of Biology, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center. He is highly cited in his field, with over 100 papers having each over 100 citations.

#6438

Frederick Kaufman

1919 - 1985 (66 years)

Frederick Kaufman was an Austrian-born American chemist. Kaufman was most notable for his research work which led to a ban on the use of chloro-fluorocarbon aerosol propellants in the United States. Kaufman was director of the University of Pittsburgh's Space Research Coordination Center, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, president of the Combustion Institute. He served on various committees of the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, AFOSR, National Science Foundation, and National Research Council. He was also president of Space Research Coordination Center. The National A...

#6439

George Wallace Kenner

1922 - 1978 (56 years)

George Wallace Kenner FRS was a British organic chemist. He was born in Sheffield in 1922, the son of Prof. James Kenner. During his childhood, he went to Didsbury Preparatory School in 1928 and moved to Manchester Grammar School in 1934. He was appointed to the first Heath Harrison Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool 1957–1976. He did his MSc and PhD degrees under Lord Todd at Manchester and Cambridge Universities in UK. He married Jillian Bird in 1951 and they had two daughters both born in Cambridge. He was faculty member at the Cambridge University for 15 years befor...

#6440

Hertha Sponer

1895 - 1968 (73 years)

Hertha Sponer was a German physicist and chemist who contributed to modern quantum mechanics and molecular physics and was the first woman on the physics faculty of Duke University. She was the older sister of philologist and resistance fighter Margot Sponer.

#6441

Wilhelm Steinkopf

1879 - 1949 (70 years)

Georg Wilhelm Steinkopf was a German chemist. Today he is mostly remembered for his work on the production of mustard gas during World War I. Life Georg Wilhelm Steinkopf was born on 28 June 1879 in Staßfurt, in the Prussian Province of Saxony in the German Empire, the son of Gustav Friedrich Steinkopf, a merchant, and his wife Elise Steinkopf .

#6442

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.

#6443

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.

#6444

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.

#6445

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.

#6446

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...

#6447

Jay Switzer

Jay A. Switzer is an American chemist, currently the Curators’ Distinguished Professor and Donald L. Castleman/FCR Missouri Endowed professor of Discovery in Chemistry at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Switzer received his BS degree in chemistry from the University of Cincinnati, and his PhD degree in inorganic chemistry from Wayne State University under Professor John F. Endicott. After receiving his PhD degree, he joined Union Oil Company of California as a senior research chemist. His research at UNOCAL was on photoelectrochemistry and the electrochemical processing of photovoltaic cells.

#6448

Harold Hartley

1878 - 1972 (94 years)

Brigadier-General Sir Harold Brewer Hartley was a British physical chemist. He moved from academia to important positions in business and industry, including serving as Chairman of the British Overseas Airways Corporation.

#6449

Herbert Newby McCoy

Herbert Newby McCoy

1870 - 1945 (75 years)

Herbert Newby McCoy was an American chemist who taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah and was the vice-president of Lindsay Light & Chemical Company. He contributed numerous papers on physical chemistry, radioactivity and rare earths.

#6450

Tadeusz Reichstein

Tadeusz Reichstein

1897 - 1996 (99 years)

Tadeusz Reichstein , also known as Tadeus Reichstein, was a Polish-Swiss chemist and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate , which was awarded for his work on the isolation of cortisone.

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