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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,

#6451

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.

#6452

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.

#6453

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.

#6454

Georg Wittig

1897 - 1987 (90 years)

Georg Wittig was a German chemist who reported a method for synthesis of alkenes from aldehydes and ketones using compounds called phosphonium ylides in the Wittig reaction. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Herbert C. Brown in 1979.

#6455

Claude Hudson

1881 - 1952 (71 years)

Claude Silbert Hudson was an American chemist who is best known for his work in the area of carbohydrate chemistry. He is also the namesake of the Claude S. Hudson Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry given by the American Chemical Society.

#6456

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.

#6457

Izaak Kolthoff

1894 - 1993 (99 years)

Izaak Maurits Kolthoff was an analytical chemist and chemistry educator. He is widely considered the father of analytical chemistry for his large volume of published research in diverse fields of analysis, his work to modernize and promote the field, and for advising a large number of students who went on to influential careers of their own.

#6458

Floyd Bartell

1883 - 1961 (78 years)

Floyd Earl Bartell was a chemist who spent his entire academic career at the University of Michigan. He specialized in the study of colloids. Early life and education Bartell was born on June 16, 1883, in Concord, Michigan. He was an undergraduate at Albion College and graduated in 1905. After a short period as an instructor of chemistry at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, Bartell returned to Michigan and began graduate studies in chemistry at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in 1910.

#6459

Edwin R. Gilliland

1909 - 1973 (64 years)

Edwin Richard Gilliland was an American chemical engineer and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gilliland was born on July 10, 1909, in El Reno, Oklahoma and moved with his family to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1918. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in 1930 and an M.S. from the Pennsylvania State University in 1931. He received his Sc.D. from MIT in 1933 under the direction of Thomas Kilgore Sherwood for work on a wetted-wall column technique used in mass-transfer. With Professor Warren K. Lewis, Gilliland developed math...

#6460

Max Tishler

1906 - 1989 (83 years)

Max Tishler was president of Merck Sharp and Dohme Research Laboratories where he led the research teams that synthesized ascorbic acid, riboflavin, cortisone, pyridoxine, pantothenic acid, nicotinamide, methionine, threonine, and tryptophan. He also developed the fermentation processes for actinomycin, vitamin B12, streptomycin, and penicillin. Tishler invented sulfaquinoxaline for the treatment for coccidiosis.

#6461

Arlie W. Schorger

1884 - 1972 (88 years)

Arlie William Schorger was a chemical researcher and businessman who also did work in ornithology. His chemistry work of note largely involved wood and waterproofing. His only chemistry book was The chemistry of cellulose and wood, but he had 34 patents.

#6462

E. J. Bowen

1898 - 1980 (82 years)

Edmund John Bowen FRS was a British physical chemist. Early life and wartime career E. J. Bowen was the eldest of four born to Edmund Riley Bowen and Lilias Bowen in 1898 in Worcester, England. He attended the Royal Grammar School Worcester.

#6463

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.

#6464

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.

#6465

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.

#6466

Warren L. McCabe

1899 - 1982 (83 years)

Warren Lee McCabe was an American Physical Chemist and is considered as one of the founding fathers of the profession of chemical engineering. He is widely known for the eponymous McCabe–Thiele method for analysis of distillation processes and his book, Unit Operations of Chemical Engineering, a major textbook.

#6467

John Masson Gulland

John Masson Gulland

1898 - 1947 (49 years)

John Masson Gulland was a Scottish chemist and biochemist. His main work was on nucleic acids, morphine and aporphine alkaloids. His work at University College Nottingham on electrometric titration was important in leading to the discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick, and he was described as "a great nucleic acid chemist." He established the Scottish Seaweed Research Association and the Lace Research Council.

#6468

Shirō Akabori

1900 - 1992 (92 years)

Shirō Akabori , 20 October 1900 – 3 November 1992 in Chihama, Ogasa , was a Japanese chemist and university professor, known for the Akabori amino-acid reactions. Life and education After graduating from public school, he began training as a pharmacist at Chiba medical school, now Chiba University, in 1918. After graduating in 1921, he joined the pharmaceutical company Momotani Juntenkan. The company hired him as an assistant to the chemist Nishizawa Yūshichi of the Imperial University of Tokyo, where he was taught by Ikeda Kikunae. In the summer of the same year, he followed Nishizawa for a short stay at the Tohoku Imperial University to learn organic chemistry from Majima Rikō.

#6469

Edward Curtis Franklin

1862 - 1937 (75 years)

Edward Curtis Franklin was an American chemist. Biography Edward Franklin was born in Geary County, Kansas. He entered the University of Kansas at the age of 22, obtaining his major in chemistry in 1888. Two years later he decided to study at the University of Berlin for one year, but abandon it by 1891. In 1892 he came back to State University where he remained till 1893 working as assistant chemist. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University where he received his doctorate in chemistry a year later. He then came back to University of Kansas where he spent one year as a chemist while the rest of the years he was an associate professor there.

#6470

Samuel Cate Prescott

1872 - 1962 (90 years)

Samuel Cate Prescott was an American food scientist and microbiologist who was involved in the development of food safety, food science, public health, and industrial microbiology. Early life Prescott was born in South Hampton, New Hampshire, the younger of two children. An older sister, Grace, later became a teacher in South Hampton, located near the Amesbury, Massachusetts area, located across the New Hampshire-Massachusetts state line. His formal education was in an ungraded schoolhouse in New Hampshire. During his fifteenth year, Prescott served as a "rod man" on a surveying crew to lay o...

#6471

Mary Elvira Weeks

1892 - 1975 (83 years)

Mary Elvira Weeks was an American chemist and historian of science. Weeks was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Kansas and the first woman to be a faculty member there.

#6472

Nathaniel Oglesby Calloway

1907 - 1979 (72 years)

Nathaniel Oglesby Calloway was an American chemist and physician. Calloway was the first African American to receive an academic doctorate from an institute west of the Mississippi River and the first African American to receive a PhD in chemistry from Iowa State University .

#6473

Arthur Roderick Collar

1908 - 1986 (78 years)

Arthur Roderick Collar CBE FRS FREng was an English scientist and engineer who made significant contributions in the areas of aeroelasticity, matrix theory and its applications in engineering dynamics.

#6474

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.

#6475

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.

#6476

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.

#6477

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.

#6478

Kazimierz Fajans

Kazimierz Fajans

1887 - 1975 (88 years)

Kazimierz Fajans was a Polish American physical chemist of Polish-Jewish origin, a pioneer in the science of radioactivity and the co-discoverer of chemical element protactinium. Education and career He was born May 27, 1887, in Warsaw, Congress Poland, to a family of Jewish background. After he had completed secondary school in Warsaw , he started studying chemistry in Germany, at first at the University in Leipzig, and then in Heidelberg and Zürich. In 1909 he was awarded a PhD degree for his research into the stereoselective synthesis of chiral compounds.

#6479

Pauline Gracia Beery Mack

Pauline Gracia Beery Mack

1891 - 1974 (83 years)

Pauline Gracia Beery Mack was an American chemist, home economist, and college administrator. Her research in calcium, nutrition, radiation, and bone density began during the 1930s, and culminated in work for NASA when she was in her seventies.

#6480

Calvin Adam Buehler

Calvin Adam Buehler

1896 - 1988 (92 years)

Calvin Adam Buehler was an American organic chemist and professor at the University of Tennessee from 1922 to 1965. He served as the Chemistry Department Head from 1940-1962, during which time he established the first chemistry doctoral program at the University of Tennessee. The chemistry building at the University of Tennessee is named Buehler Hall in his honor.

#6481

Peter Joseph Moloney

1891 - 1989 (98 years)

Peter Joseph Moloney was a Canadian chemist. He is known for his work on developing vaccines against diphtheria and tetanus, purifying insulin preparations for clinical use, demonstrating antibodies against insulin in humans and animals, and developing sulfated insulin preparationss for the treatment of diabetics with insulin resistance. He also invented a quick-acting pH electrode and helped to develop an antiserum that was used in WW II for protection against gas gangrene.

#6482

Victor Goldschmidt

Victor Goldschmidt

1888 - 1947 (59 years)

Victor Moritz Goldschmidt was a Norwegian mineralogist considered to be the founder of modern geochemistry and crystal chemistry, developer of the Goldschmidt Classification of elements. Early life and education Goldschmidt was born in Zürich, Switzerland on 27 January 1888. His father, Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt, was a physical chemist at the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum and his mother, Amelie Koehne , was the daughter of a lumber merchant. They named him Viktor after a colleague of Heinrich, Victor Meyer. His father's family was Jewish back to at least 1600 and mostly highly educated, with rabbis, judges, lawyers and military officers among their numbers.

#6483

Rutherford John Gettens

1900 - 1974 (74 years)

Rutherford John Gettens was a chemist and pioneering conservation scientist. Born to Daniel and Clara Gettens, Rutherford John Gettens grew up in Mooers, New York, where he became valedictorian of his high school class in 1918. He received his B.S. from Middlebury College in 1923. On graduating, he taught chemistry at Colby College, Maine, before receiving his M.A. from Harvard University in 1929.

#6484

Maurice Brodie

1903 - 1939 (36 years)

Maurice Brodie was a British-born American virologist who developed a polio vaccine in 1935. Early years and education Brodie was born in Liverpool, England, the son of Samuel Broude and Esther Ginsburg. The family immigrated to Ottawa, Canada, in 1910. Maurice graduated from Lisgar Collegiate Institute and McGill University Faculty of Medicine, Alpha Omega Alpha, in 1928; he was named a Wood Gold Medalist. He served as a medical intern, and in 1931 he received a Master of Science degree in physiology from McGill. Brodie belonged to the McGill chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu, and had been a staff reporter of the Ottawa Citizen, 1927–1928.

#6485

Thomas Stevens Stevens

1900 - 2000 (100 years)

Thomas Stevens Stevens FRS FRSE was a 20th Scottish organic chemist. He was affectionately known as T.S.S. or Tommy Stevens. Life He was born in Renfrew on 8 October 1900, the only son of John Stevens and his wife, Jane Irving. His father was a design engineer and Production Director of William Simons & Co. shipbuilders in Renfrew. He was home educated by his mother until 1908 then educated at Paisley Grammar School. In 1915 he moved to Glasgow Academy and completed his education there in 1917.

#6486

Joseph W. Kennedy

Joseph W. Kennedy

1916 - 1957 (41 years)

Joseph William Kennedy was an American chemist who was a co-discoverer of plutonium, along with Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin McMillan and Arthur Wahl. During World War II he was head of the CM Division at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where he oversaw research onto the chemistry and metallurgy of uranium and plutonium. After the war, he was recruited as a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is credited with transforming a university primarily concerned with undergraduate teaching into one that also boasts strong graduate and research programs. He died of ca...

#6487

Hermann Staudinger

Hermann Staudinger

1881 - 1965 (84 years)

Hermann Staudinger was a German organic chemist who demonstrated the existence of macromolecules, which he characterized as polymers. For this work he received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is also known for his discovery of ketenes and of the Staudinger reaction. Staudinger, together with Leopold Ružička, also elucidated the molecular structures of pyrethrin I and II in the 1920s, enabling the development of pyrethroid insecticides in the 1960s and 1970s.

#6488

Robert Robinson

Robert Robinson

1886 - 1975 (89 years)

Sir Robert Robinson was a British organic chemist and Nobel laureate recognised in 1947 for his research on plant dyestuffs and alkaloids. In 1947, he also received the Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm.

#6489

Harold Ellingham

1897 - 1975 (78 years)

Harold Johann Thomas Ellingham, OBE, was a British physical chemist, best known for his Ellingham diagrams, which summarize a large amount of information concerning extractive metallurgy. Ellingham was born in Tottenham on 21 November 1897, the son of Thomas Robert Ellingham and Katherine Caroline Bauer.

#6490

William Gidley Emmett

1887 - 1985 (98 years)

William Gidley Emmett FRSE was a British industrial chemist, educationalist and academic author. In education he spoke out against traditional examination methods and developed a series of non-standard tests to assess IQ, now commonly appearing in standard IQ tests, and generally known as the Moray House Tests.

#6491

William P. Murphy

William P. Murphy

1892 - 1987 (95 years)

William Parry Murphy was an American physician who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George Richards Minot and George Hoyt Whipple for their combined work in devising and treating macrocytic anemia .

#6492

Arne Ölander

1902 - 1984 (82 years)

Gustav Arne Ölander was a Swedish chemist, known for his discovery of the shape-memory effect in metal alloys. He was the son of Gustaf Ölander and Hilda Ölander née Norrman. Ölander became an associate professor of physical chemistry at Stockholm University in 1929. He was a professor of theoretical chemistry and electrochemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology 1936–1943, in inorganic and physical chemistry at Stockholm University 1943–1960, and in physical chemistry at Stockholm University 1960–1968.

#6493

Paul Karrer

1889 - 1971 (82 years)

Professor Paul Karrer FRS FRSE FCS was a Swiss organic chemist best known for his research on vitamins. He and Norman Haworth won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1937. Biography Early years Karrer was born in Moscow, Russia to Paul Karrer and Julie Lerch, both Swiss nationals. In 1892 Karrer's family returned to Switzerland where he was educated at Wildegg and at the grammar school in Lenzburg, Aarau, where he matriculated in 1908. He studied chemistry at the University of Zurich under Alfred Werner and after gaining his Ph.D. in 1911, he spent a further year as assistant in the Chemical Institute.

#6494

Gordon Aylward

1900 - Present (125 years)

Gordon Hillis Aylward is an Australian chemical author. He is known for writing the SI Chemical Data book. Biography Aylward graduated on 20 May 1952 with a BSc in Applied Chemistry from the then-new University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Later he received a MSc from the same university, and continued to teach Analytical Chemistry for 13 years there. During that period he organized the Approach to Chemistry summer schools, together with his co-teacher dr Tristan Findlay. To support the course, they wrote the book SI Chemical Data as the textbook.

#6495

Frederick Mason Brewer

1903 - 1963 (60 years)

Frederick Mason Brewer CBE FRIC was an English chemist. He was Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford and Mayor of Oxford during 1959–60. Frederick Brewer was born in Kensal Rise , Middlesex, England. He was the son of Frederick Charles Brewer and Ellen Maria Owen, both school teachers. Brewer studied chemistry at Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1920, having received an open scholarship, and subsequently gained a first class degree. After his undergraduate studies, Brewer undertook research with Prof. Frederick Soddy.

#6496

Hans Stammreich

1902 - 1969 (67 years)

Hans Stammreich , was a Brazilian chemist of German origin and an important pioneer of Raman spectroscopy and molecular spectroscopy. Life After obtaining his PhD in physical chemistry after studying under Adolf Miethe at the Berlin Technical University, Stammreich became soon, partly influenced by his personal friendship with Albert Einstein, interested in molecular spectroscopy, especially Raman spectroscopy. After he was fired from TU Berlin in April 1933 because of his Jewish background, Stammreich emigrated to Paris, where he stayed until 1940, working in the labs of Paul Langevin and Ch...

#6497

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.

#6498

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...

#6499

Yelavarthy Nayudamma

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.

#6500

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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