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,
#6451
William Ramsay
1852 - 1916 (64 years)
Sir William Ramsay was a Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gases and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904 "in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air" along with his collaborator, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics that same year for their discovery of argon. After the two men identified argon, Ramsay investigated other atmospheric gases. His work in isolating argon, helium, neon, krypton, and xenon led to the development of a new section of the periodic table.
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Richard Abegg
1869 - 1910 (41 years)
Richard Wilhelm Heinrich Abegg was a German chemist and pioneer of valence theory. He proposed that the difference of the maximum positive and negative valence of an element tends to be eight. This has come to be known as Abegg's rule. He was a gas balloon enthusiast, which caused his death at the age of 41 when he crashed in his balloon in Silesia.
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Jean-Baptiste Dumas
1800 - 1884 (84 years)
Jean Baptiste André Dumas was a French chemist, best known for his works on organic analysis and synthesis, as well as the determination of atomic weights and molecular weights by measuring vapor densities. He also developed a method for the analysis of nitrogen in compounds.
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Joseph Priestley
1733 - 1804 (71 years)
Joseph Priestley was an English chemist, natural philosopher, separatist theologian, grammarian, multi-subject educator, and liberal political theorist. He published over 150 works, and conducted experiments in several areas of science.
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Humphry Davy
1778 - 1829 (51 years)
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet, was a British chemist and inventor who invented the Davy lamp and a very early form of arc lamp. He is also remembered for isolating, by using electricity, several elements for the first time: potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron the following year, as well as for discovering the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. Davy also studied the forces involved in these separations, inventing the new field of electrochemistry. Davy is also credited to have been the first to discover clathrate hydrates in his lab.
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Robert Boyle
1627 - 1691 (64 years)
Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, alchemist and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry. He was a devout and pi...
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Ronald George Wreyford Norrish
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Ronald George Wreyford Norrish FRS was a British chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967. Education and early life Norrish was born in Cambridge and was educated at The Perse School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was a former student of Eric Rideal. From an early age he was interested in chemistry, walking up and down Cambridge University chemical laboratory admiring all the equipment. His father encouraged him to construct and equip a small laboratory in his garden shed in his garden and supplied all the chemicals he needed to conduct experiments. This apparatus now...
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Alfred Werner
1866 - 1919 (53 years)
Alfred Werner was a Swiss chemist who was a student at ETH Zurich and a professor at the University of Zurich. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1913 for proposing the octahedral configuration of transition metal complexes. Werner developed the basis for modern coordination chemistry. He was the first inorganic chemist to win the Nobel Prize, and the only one prior to 1973.
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Henri Moissan
1852 - 1907 (55 years)
Ferdinand Frédéric Henri Moissan was a French chemist and pharmacist who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in isolating fluorine from its compounds. Moissan was one of the original members of the International Atomic Weights Committee.
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Fritz Strassmann
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann was a German chemist who, with Otto Hahn in December 1938, identified the element barium as a product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons. Their observation was the key piece of evidence necessary to identify the previously unknown phenomenon of nuclear fission, as was subsequently recognized and published by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch. In their second publication on nuclear fission in February of 1939, Strassmann and Hahn predicted the existence and liberation of additional neutrons during the fission process, opening up the possibility of a nuclear cha...
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Stanislao Cannizzaro
1826 - 1910 (84 years)
Stanislao Cannizzaro was an Italian chemist. He is famous for the Cannizzaro reaction and for his influential role in the atomic-weight deliberations of the Karlsruhe Congress in 1860. Biography Cannizzaro was born in Palermo in 1826. He entered the university there with the intention of making medicine his profession, but he soon turned to the study of chemistry. In 1845 and 1846, he acted as assistant to Raffaele Piria , known for his work on salicin, and who was then professor of chemistry at Pisa and subsequently occupied the same position at Turin.
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Karl Ziegler
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Karl Waldemar Ziegler was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963, with Giulio Natta, for work on polymers. The Nobel Committee recognized his "excellent work on organometallic compounds [which]...led to new polymerization reactions and ... paved the way for new and highly useful industrial processes". He is also known for his work involving free-radicals, many-membered rings, and organometallic compounds, as well as the development of Ziegler–Natta catalyst. One of many awards Ziegler received was the Werner von Siemens Ring in 1960 jointly with Otto Bayer and Walter Re...
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Emil Fischer
1852 - 1919 (67 years)
Hermann Emil Louis Fischer was a German chemist and 1902 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He discovered the Fischer esterification. He also developed the Fischer projection, a symbolic way of drawing asymmetric carbon atoms. He also hypothesized lock and key mechanism of enzyme action. He never used his first given name, and was known throughout his life simply as Emil Fischer.
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Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted was a Danish physical chemist, who developed the Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory simultaneously with and independently of Martin Lowry. Biography Brønsted was born in Varde, Denmark on 22 February 1879. His mother died shortly after his birth and at the age of 14, Brønsted lost his father and moved to Copenhagen with his older sister and his stepmother. In 1897, Brønsted began his studies as a chemical engineer at the Polytechnic Institute in Copenhagen. After his first degree, Brønsted changed fields and received his magister degree in chemistry in 1902 from the University of Copenhagen.
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Friedrich Konrad Beilstein
1838 - 1906 (68 years)
Friedrich Konrad Beilstein , was a Russian chemist and founder of the famous Handbuch der organischen Chemie . The first edition of this work, published in 1881, covered 1,500 compounds in 2,200 pages. This handbook is now known as the Beilstein database.
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Alfred Stock
1876 - 1946 (70 years)
Alfred Stock was a German inorganic chemist. He did pioneering research on the hydrides of boron and silicon, coordination chemistry, mercury, and mercury poisoning. The German Chemical Society's Alfred-Stock Memorial Prize is named after him.
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Giulio Natta
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Giulio Natta was an Italian chemical engineer and Nobel laureate. He won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963 with Karl Ziegler for work on high polymers. He also received a Lomonosov Gold Medal in 1969.
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Antoine Béchamp
1816 - 1908 (92 years)
Pierre Jacques Antoine Béchamp was a French scientist now best known for breakthroughs in applied organic chemistry and for a bitter rivalry with Louis Pasteur. Béchamp developed the Béchamp reduction, an inexpensive method to produce aniline dye, permitting William Henry Perkin to launch the synthetic-dye industry. Béchamp also synthesized the first organic arsenical drug, arsanilic acid, from which Paul Ehrlich later synthesized salvarsan, the first chemotherapeutic drug.
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Henry Cavendish
1731 - 1810 (79 years)
Henry Cavendish was an English natural philosopher and scientist who was an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He is noted for his discovery of hydrogen, which he termed "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper, On Factitious Airs. Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and gave the element its name.
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Alexander William Williamson
1824 - 1904 (80 years)
Prof Alexander William Williamson FRS FRSE PCS MRIA was an English chemist. He is best known today for the Williamson ether synthesis. Life Williamson was born in 1824 in Wandsworth, London, the second of three children of Alexander Williamson a clerk with the East India Company and his wife, Antonia McAndrew, daughter of a prominent London merchant. Despite early physical infirmity, the loss of sight in one eye and a largely useless left arm, Williamson grew up in a caring and stimulating intellectual environment. After an early childhood spent in Brighton and then schools in Kensington, Williams enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in 1841.
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Michael Polanyi
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing.
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Prafulla Chandra Ray
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Sir Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, CIE, FNI, FRASB, FIAS, FCS was an Indian chemist, educationist, historian, industrialist and philanthropist. He established the first modern Indian research school in chemistry and is regarded as the Father of Indian Chemistry.
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Hermann Kolbe
1818 - 1884 (66 years)
Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe was a major contributor to the birth of modern organic chemistry. He was a professor at Marburg and Leipzig. Kolbe was the first to apply the term synthesis in a chemical context, and contributed to the philosophical demise of vitalism through synthesis of the organic substance acetic acid from carbon disulfide, and also contributed to the development of structural theory. This was done via modifications to the idea of "radicals" and accurate prediction of the existence of secondary and tertiary alcohols, and to the emerging array of organic reactions through his ...
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James Crafts
1839 - 1917 (78 years)
James Mason Crafts was an American chemist, mostly known for developing the Friedel–Crafts alkylation and acylation reactions with Charles Friedel in 1876. Biography James Crafts, the son of Royal Altamont Crafts and Marianne Mason , was born in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard University in 1858. Although he never received his Ph.D., he studied chemistry in Germany at the Academy of Mines of Freiberg, and served as an assistant to Robert Bunsen at Heidelberg, and then with Wurtz in Paris .
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Joseph Black
1728 - 1799 (71 years)
Joseph Black was a Scottish physicist and chemist, known for his discoveries of magnesium, latent heat, specific heat, and carbon dioxide. He was Professor of Anatomy and Chemistry at the University of Glasgow for 10 years from 1756, and then Professor of Medicine and Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh from 1766, teaching and lecturing there for more than 30 years.
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Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
1778 - 1850 (72 years)
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for his discovery that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen by volume , for two laws related to gases, and for his work on alcohol–water mixtures, which led to the degrees Gay-Lussac used to measure alcoholic beverages in many countries.
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Alfred Nobel
1833 - 1896 (63 years)
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist. He is known for inventing dynamite as well as having bequeathed his fortune to establish the Nobel Prize. He also made several important contributions to science, holding 355 patents in his lifetime. Nobel's most famous invention was dynamite, an explosive using nitroglycerin; it was patented in 1867.
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Viktor Meyer
1848 - 1897 (49 years)
Viktor Meyer was a German chemist and significant contributor to both organic and inorganic chemistry. He is best known for inventing an apparatus for determining vapour densities, the Viktor Meyer apparatus, and for discovering thiophene, a heterocyclic compound. He is sometimes referred to as Victor Meyer, a name used in some of his publications.
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Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch was a German chemist. Life and work Hantzsch studied chemistry in Dresden and graduated at the University of Würzburg under Johannes Wislicenus. As a professor, he taught at the Universities of Zürich, Würzburg und Leipzig.
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Amedeo Avogadro
1776 - 1856 (80 years)
Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro, Count of Quaregna and Cerreto was an Italian scientist, most noted for his contribution to molecular theory now known as Avogadro's law, which states that equal volumes of gases under the same conditions of temperature and pressure will contain equal numbers of molecules. In tribute to him, the ratio of the number of elementary entities in a substance to its amount of substance , , is known as the Avogadro constant. This constant is denoted NA, and is one of the seven defining constants of the SI.
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Jaroslav Heyrovský
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
Jaroslav Heyrovský was a Czech chemist and inventor. Heyrovský was the inventor of the polarographic method, father of the electroanalytical method, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1959 for his invention and development of the polarographic methods of analysis. His main field of work was polarography.
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Edward Frankland
1825 - 1899 (74 years)
Sir Edward Frankland, was an English chemist. He was one of the originators of organometallic chemistry and introduced the concept of combining power or valence. An expert in water quality and analysis, he was a member of the second royal commission on the pollution of rivers, and studied London's water quality for decades. He also studied luminous flames and the effects of atmospheric pressure on dense ignited gas, and was one of the discoverers of helium.
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Alessandro Volta
1745 - 1827 (82 years)
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian physicist and chemist who was a pioneer of electricity and power and is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the president of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta's invention sparked a great amount of scientific excitement an...
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Carl Wilhelm Scheele
1742 - 1786 (44 years)
Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a Swedish German pharmaceutical chemist. Scheele discovered oxygen , and identified molybdenum, tungsten, barium, hydrogen, and chlorine, among others. Scheele discovered organic acids tartaric, oxalic, uric, lactic, and citric, as well as hydrofluoric, hydrocyanic, and arsenic acids. He preferred speaking German to Swedish his whole life, as German was commonly spoken among Swedish pharmacists.
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Carl Remigius Fresenius
1818 - 1897 (79 years)
Carl Remigius Fresenius , was a German chemist, known for his studies in analytical chemistry. Biography Fresenius was born on 28 December 1818, in Frankfurt, Germany. After working for some time for a pharmacy in his native town, he entered Bonn University in 1840, and a year later migrated to Gießen, where he acted as assistant in Liebig's laboratory, and in 1843, became an assistant professor.
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Richard Willstätter
1872 - 1942 (70 years)
Richard Martin Willstätter FRS HFRSE was a German organic chemist whose study of the structure of plant pigments, chlorophyll included, won him the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Willstätter invented paper chromatography following the initial description of the separation technique by Mikhail Tsvet.
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Clemens Winkler
1838 - 1904 (66 years)
Clemens Alexander Winkler was a German chemist who discovered the element germanium in 1886, solidifying Dmitri Mendeleev's theory of periodicity. Life Winkler was born in 1838 in Freiberg, Kingdom of Saxony the son of a chemist who had studied under Berzelius. Winkler's early education was at schools in Freiberg, Dresden, and Chemnitz. In 1857 he entered the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, where his knowledge of analytical chemistry surpassed what he was being taught there. Sixteen years later, Winkler was appointed a professor of chemical technology and analytical chemistry ...
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Leopold Gmelin
1788 - 1853 (65 years)
Leopold Gmelin was a German chemist. Gmelin was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. He worked on the red prussiate and created Gmelin's test, and wrote his Handbook of Chemistry, which over successive editions became a standard reference work still in use.
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Victor Grignard
1871 - 1935 (64 years)
Francois Auguste Victor Grignard was a French chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the eponymously named Grignard reagent and Grignard reaction, both of which are important in the formation of carbon–carbon bonds.
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Rainer Ludwig Claisen
1851 - 1930 (79 years)
Rainer Ludwig Claisen was a German chemist best known for his work with condensations of carbonyls and sigmatropic rearrangements. He was born in Cologne as the son of a jurist and studied chemistry at the university of Bonn , where he became a member of K.St.V. Arminia. He served in the army as a nurse in 1870–1871 and continued his studies at Göttingen University. He returned to the University of Bonn in 1872 and started his academic career at the same university in 1874. He died in 1930 in Godesberg am Rhein .
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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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