The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#6401
Vojtěch Šafařík
1829 - 1902 (73 years)
Vojtěch Šafařík was a Czech chemist, specialising in inorganic chemistry. Šafařík was the son of Pavel Jozef Šafárik, a Slovak philologist and historian. The crater Šafařík on the Moon is named after him, and so is the minor planet 8336 Šafařík .
Go to Profile#6402
Umetaro Suzuki
1874 - 1943 (69 years)
was a Japanese scientist, born in what is now part of Makinohara, Shizuoka, Japan. He was a member of the Imperial Academy, and a recipient of the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Order of Culture. His research was among the earliest of modern vitamin research.
Go to Profile#6403
Thomas Anderson
1819 - 1874 (55 years)
Thomas Anderson was a 19th-century Scottish chemist. In 1853 his work on alkaloids led him to discover the correct formula/composition for codeine. In 1868 he discovered pyridine and related organic compounds such as picoline through studies on the distillation of bone oil and other animal matter.
Go to Profile#6404
Nikolai Shilov
1872 - 1930 (58 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Shilov was a Russian and Soviet chemist who studied reactions, catalysis, and induction. Shilov was born in Moscow and graduated in 1895 after which he worked in Leipzig in Wilhelm Ostwald's laboratory on chemical kinetics. In 1910 he became a professor of inorganic chemistry at the Moscow Technical College. During World War I he was involved with studies on gas warfare and developed along with N. D. Zelinsky charcoal adsorption masks for the protection of the Russian army. He studied oxidation reactions and introduced several terms including inductor, acceptor, and induction factor.
Go to Profile#6405
Jędrzej Śniadecki
1768 - 1838 (70 years)
Jędrzej Śniadecki was a Polish writer, physician, chemist, biologist and philosopher. His achievements include being the first person who linked rickets to lack of sunlight. He also created modern Polish terminology in the field of chemistry.
Go to Profile#6406
J. Norman Collie
1859 - 1942 (83 years)
Professor John Norman Collie FRSE FRS , commonly referred to as J. Norman Collie, was an English scientist, mountaineer and explorer. Life and work He was born in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, the second of four sons to John Collie and Selina Mary Winkworth. In 1870 the family moved to Clifton, near Bristol, and John was educated initially at Windlesham in Surrey and then in 1873 at Charterhouse School. The family money had been made in the cotton trade, but in 1875 the American Civil War resulted in their financial ruin when their American stock was burnt. Collie had to leave Charterhouse and transfer to Clifton College, Bristol where he realised he was completely unsuited for the classics.
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Emil Votoček
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Emil Votoček was a Czech chemist, composer and music theorist. He is noted for his chemistry textbooks and multilingual dictionaries in both chemistry and music. Chemistry career Votoček studied at the Czech Institute of Technology later in Mulhouse and received his PhD with Bernhard Tollens at the University of Göttingen for his chemistry of sugar.
Go to Profile#6408
William Hultz Walker
1869 - 1934 (65 years)
William Hultz Walker was an American chemist and professor. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated in 1890 at Penn State College and took his Ph.D. at Göttingen . In 1894 he accepted the chair of industrial chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where from 1908 he was also director of the research laboratory of applied chemistry. Walker was vice president of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry in 1893 and president of the American Electrochemical Society in 1910. The New York Section of the American Chemical Society conferred on him its Nichols me...
Go to Profile#6409
Yelavarthy Nayudamma
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Yelavarthy Nayudamma was a chemical engineer and a scientist killed on Air India Flight 182 . Early life and education Nayudamma was born on 10 September 1922 into an agricultural family at Yelavarru village near Tenali in Guntur district of present day Andhra Pradesh state in India. He was the eldest of three brothers and a sister. His parents Raghavamma and Anjaih named him Nayudammma . Nayudamma who was over 6 feet tall lived up to his name.
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Jan Kok
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Jan Kok was a Dutch pharmacist. In 1945, he was appointed as professor at the University of Amsterdam, and between 1960 and 1964 he was rector magnificus of this university. External links Biography Prof. dr. J. Kok, 1899 - 1982 at the University of Amsterdam Album Academicum website
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Roger Adams
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Roger Adams was an American organic chemist who developed the eponymous Adams' catalyst, and helped determine the composition of natural substances such as complex vegetable oils and plant alkaloids. He isolated and identified CBD in 1940. As head of the Chemistry department at the University of Illinois from 1926 to 1954, he influenced graduate education in America, taught over 250 Ph.D. students and postgraduate students, and served in military science during World War I and World War II.
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Nikolay Zelinsky
1861 - 1953 (92 years)
Nikolay Dmitriyevich Zelinsky was a Russian and Soviet chemist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union . Zelinsky studied at the University of Odessa and at the universities of Leipzig and Göttingen in Germany. Zelinsky was one of the founders of theory on organic catalysis. He was the inventor of the first effective filtering activated charcoal gas mask in the world .
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Oliver Patterson Watts
1865 - 1953 (88 years)
Oliver Patterson Watts was a professor of chemical engineering and applied electrochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Born in Thomaston, Maine, Watts received his bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in 1889. He received his doctoral degree in 1905; he was the first person to be awarded a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he served as a professor until 1935, after which he was an emeritus professor in the university's college of engineering. Watts is known for his development of the hot nickel plating bath known as the "Watts Bath", which he f...
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James Wilfred Cook
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Sir James Wilfred Cook FRS FRSE DSc LLD was an English chemist, best known for his research of organic chemistry of carcinogenic compounds. Friends knew him simply as Jim Cook. Life He was born in South Kensington in London on 10 December 1900, the son of Charles William Cook, a coachman, and his wife, Frances Wall. Using a London County Council scholarship he attended Sloane School in Chelsea, London.
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Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer
1899 - 1957 (58 years)
Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer was a German chemist. Education and career Born in Breslau, he was an older brother of martyred theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His father was neurologist Karl Bonhoeffer and his mother was Paula von Hase.
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Rose May Davis
1894 - Present (132 years)
Rose May Davis was an American chemist. In 1929 she became the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. from Duke University. Early life and education Rose May Davis was born on 17 November 1894 in Cumberland, Maryland, to Baptist Minister Quinton C. Davis and Sarah E. Davis. She studied a variety of subjects, such as music, law, and chemistry, and attended several institutions in pursuit of her education, including Chowan College , the Southern Conservatory of Music , Trinity College , the University of Virginia , Duke University . During her time at Trinity College, Davis was a member of the Panhellenic Council, the Chanticleer Board, Athena Literary Society, Eko-L, and Zeta Tau Alpha.
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Ray Wendland
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Ray Theodore Wendland was an American experimental chemist and academician. Education Wendland was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July, 1911, and educated at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, receiving a B.A. degree in chemistry in 1933. From there, he matriculated to Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, to pursue graduate studies. He was awarded a Ph.D. from that institution in 1937. Postdoctoral appointments followed at Carnegie Technical Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, centering on the refinement of rubber production under the auspices of the U.S.
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Theodor Svedberg
1884 - 1971 (87 years)
Theodor Svedberg was a Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate for his research on colloids and proteins using the ultracentrifuge. Svedberg was active at Uppsala University from the mid-1900s to late 1940s. While at Uppsala, Svedberg started as a docent before becoming the university's physical chemistry head in 1912. After leaving Uppsala in 1949, Svedberg was in charge of the Gustaf Werner Institute until 1967. Apart from his 1926 Nobel Prize, Svedberg was named a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1944 and became part of the National Academy of Sciences in 1945.
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Vladimir Engelgardt
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Engelgardt was a Soviet biochemist, academician of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences , academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences , and Hero of Socialist Labor . He was the founder and the first director of the Institute of Molecular Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences .
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Jean Piccard
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Jean Felix Piccard , also known as Jean Piccard, was a Swiss-born American chemist, engineer, professor and high-altitude balloonist. He invented clustered high-altitude balloons, and with his wife Jeannette, the plastic balloon. Piccard's inventions and co-inventions are used in balloon flight, aircraft and spacecraft.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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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