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,
#6601
Maurice Loyal Huggins
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Maurice Loyal Huggins was a scientist who independently conceived the idea of hydrogen bonding and who was an early advocate for their role in stabilizing protein secondary structure. An important polymer theory, Flory–Huggins theory, is also named after him.
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Ole Lamm
1902 - 1964 (62 years)
Ole Albert Lamm , was a Swedish physical chemist whose research included diffusion and sedimentation phenomena. Lamm was a graduate student under Nobel Prize laureate The Svedberg at Uppsala University and received his doctorate in 1937 with the thesis Measurements of concentration gradients in sedimentation and diffusion by refraction methods: Solubility properties of potato starch. In 1945, he was appointed professor of theoretical chemistry, from 1953 physical chemistry, at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Go to Profile#6603
Victor Villiger
1868 - 1934 (66 years)
Victor Villiger was a Swiss-born German chemist and the discoverer of the Baeyer-Villiger oxidation. Life He studied at the University of Geneva. Following his graduation, he began his doctoral studies with Adolf von Baeyer at the University of Munich.
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John Stanley Griffith
1928 - 1972 (44 years)
John Stanley Griffith was a British chemist, mathematician and biophysicist. He was the nephew of the distinguished British bacteriologist Frederick Griffith. Career Beginning as an undergraduate in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1946–1949, he went on to read Part II biochemistry in 1949–1951. His research career continued in theoretical chemistry at Oxford and Cambridge, where he held a Berry-Ramsey research fellowship at King's College. He had several appointments in Britain and the US in his different disciplines. These included professorships in chemistry at Indiana Universi...
Go to Profile#6605
Augustus George Vernon Harcourt
1834 - 1919 (85 years)
Augustus George Vernon Harcourt FRS was an English chemist who spent his career at Oxford University. He was one of the first scientists to do quantitative work in the field of chemical kinetics. His uncle, William Vernon Harcourt , founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Adolf Martin Pleischl
1787 - 1867 (80 years)
Adolf Martin Pleischl was a chemist and medical doctor. In 1815 he obtained his medical doctorate from the University of Prague, where he later served as a professor of general and pharmaceutical chemistry . At Prague he is credited with improvement and redevelopment of the chemical-pharmaceutical institute. In 1838 he relocated to the University of Vienna, where he also redeveloped and modernized its chemical and pharmaceutical facilities. As an instructor, two of his better-known students were Johann Florian Heller and Johann August Natterer .
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Arie Jan Haagen-Smit
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Arie Jan Haagen-Smit was a Dutch chemist. He is best known for linking the smog in Southern California to automobiles and is therefore known by many as the "father" of air pollution control. After serving as an original board member of the Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board, formed in 1960 to combat the smog, Dr. Haagen-Smit became the California Air Resources Board's first chairman in 1968. Shortly before his death in Pasadena, California of lung cancer, the Air Resources Board's El Monte Laboratory was named after him.
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Pietro Biginelli
1860 - 1937 (77 years)
Pietro Biginelli was an Italian chemist, who discovered a three-component reaction between urea, acetoacetic ester and aldehydes . He also studied various aspects of sanitation chemistry and chemical products' quality control.
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Wilhelm Henneberg
1825 - 1890 (65 years)
Wilhelm Henneberg was a German chemist and student of Justus von Liebig. Life He attended the Collegium Carolinum in Brunswick and studied at the University of Giessen with Justus von Liebig and at the University of Jena where he received his Ph.D in 1849. It was under the influence of Liebig that Henneberg decided to devote his career to agricultural chemistry.
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Lucius A. Bigelow
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
Lucius Aurelius Bigelow was an American chemist, specializing in the fluorination of organic compounds. Early life Bigelow was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 31, 1892 to Lucius Aurelius and Mary Elizabeth Bigelow. He graduated from Boston English High.
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Brian Duncan Shaw
1898 - 1999 (101 years)
Lieutenant Colonel Brian Duncan Shaw, was a British chemistry lecturer at the University of Nottingham, known for his demonstrations on explosives. Early and personal life Shaw was born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, the fourth and youngest child of Samuel Shaw and Lydia Emma Shaw, his brothers and sisters being named Lydia Emma, Mabel and Clarence Gordon. His father was a brick manufacturer and his mother had been working as a teacher.
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Arthur Smithells
1860 - 1939 (79 years)
Arthur Smithells, CMG FRS was a British chemist. Early life and education Smithells was born in Bury, Lancashire on 24 May 1860. His father James Smithells was a railway manager. He was educated at the University of Glasgow and then spent time under Roscoe and Schorlemmer at Owens College, Manchester. He gained his BSc from the University of London, then took supplemental courses in Munich and with Robert Bunsen at Heidelberg University.
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Vladimir Vernadsky
1863 - 1945 (82 years)
Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky , also spelt Volodymyr Ivanovych Vernadsky was a Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. He was one of the founders and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences . Vladimir Vernadsky is most noted for his 1926 book The Biosphere in which he inadvertently worked to popularize Eduard Suess' 1885 term biosphere, by hypothesizing that life is the geological force that shapes the earth. In 1943 he was awarded the Stalin Prize. Vernadsky's portrait...
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Sven-Olov Lawesson
1926 - 1988 (62 years)
Sven-Olov Lawesson was a Swedish chemist known for his popularization of Lawesson's reagent within the chemical community. He is also known for his 1982 work exploring the possibility of a connection between recreational use of amyl nitrite and an increased incidence of Kaposi's sarcoma in homosexual men.
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Wilhelm Weith
1844 - 1881 (37 years)
Wilhelm Weith was a German-Swiss chemist. He studied chemistry at the polytechnic institute in Zürich and at the University of Heidelberg, receiving his doctorate in 1865 from the University of Zürich. Shortly afterwards, he obtained his habilitation and became a lecturer at both the polyclinic and university. At Zürich, he often served as a substitute teacher for chemist Georg Städeler. In 1871 he became an associate professor of chemistry, followed by a full professorship in 1874. He died from an illness during a stay in Ajaccio, Corsica on 28 November 1881, aged 35.
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Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs
1836 - 1923 (87 years)
Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs was a chemist and natural philosopher most widely known for his findings on periodic laws within the chemical elements. Life Hinrichs was born in 1836 in Lunden in the Duchy of Holstein, which at that time was under the rule of Denmark although it was simultaneously part of the German Confederation. He attended the local polytechnic school and the University of Copenhagen. During his schooling he published several articles and books, including descriptions of the magnetic field of Earth and its interaction with the aether.
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Karl Hugo Huppert
1832 - 1904 (72 years)
Karl Hugo Huppert was a German chemist and physician. Life and achievements Karl Hugo Huppert, son of a wood turner and merchant, Christian Huppert, studied in Leipzig as a pupil of Karl Gotthelf Lehmann , and also at the University of Jena. In 1860 he was appointed head of the chemical laboratory of the Jakob Hospital in Leipzig. In 1862 he took his doctoral examination in medicine, and in the same year acquired his postdoctoral qualification in biochemistry and was in charge of what was then called the “zoochemisches laboratorium”.
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Frederick G. Keyes
1919 - 1985 (66 years)
Frederick George Keyes was an American physical chemist. Keyes was most notable for inventing a method to sterilize milk using ultraviolet rays, and discovering that ultraviolet rays kill germs. According to the National Academies Press, Keyes was also notable for "advances in thermodynamics, equations of state of gases, and thermodynamic properties, in particular liquid water and steam".
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Wilhelm Fleischmann
1837 - 1920 (83 years)
Wilhelm Fleischmann was a German agriculturist and chemist. He is known for his work on the chemistry of milk. Biography He received his education at Nuremberg, Würzburg, Erlangen and Munich. In Justus von Liebig's laboratory in 1862, he began work on agricultural chemistry, and in 1864-67 while teaching in the Realschule at Memmingen conducted experiments there. From 1867 to 1876, he was principal of the Realschule at Lindau and for the following 10 years directed the first dairy experiment station of Germany, in the vicinity of Lalendorf, Mecklenburg. From 1886 to 1896, he was director of the Agricultural Institute at Königsberg and of that at Göttingen after 1896.
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John Young Buchanan
1844 - 1925 (81 years)
John Young Buchanan FRSE FRS FCS was a Scottish chemist, oceanographer and Arctic explorer. He was an important part of the Challenger Expedition. Life He was born in Partickhill, Glasgow on 20 February 1844, the son of Jane Young and her husband, John Buchanan of Dowanhill, a relatively affluent landowner. His brother was the statesman Thomas Ryburn Buchanan.
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Antonio Luna
1866 - 1899 (33 years)
Antonio Narciso Luna de San Pedro y Novicio Ancheta was a Filipino army general who fought in the Philippine–American War before his assassination on June 5, 1899 at the age of 32. Regarded as one of the fiercest generals of his time, he succeeded Artemio Ricarte as the Commanding General of the Philippine Army. He sought to apply his background in military science to the fledgling army. A sharpshooter himself, he organized professional guerrilla soldiers later named the "Luna Sharpshooters" and the "Black Guard" with Senyor Michael Joaquin. His three-tier defense, now known as the Luna Defen...
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Ludwig Barth zu Barthenau
1839 - 1890 (51 years)
Ludwig Barth zu Barthenau was an Austrian chemist born in Rovereto. He studied under Justus von Liebig in Munich, and in 1867 was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Innsbruck. In 1876 he succeeded Heinrich Hlasiwetz as professor of chemistry at the University of Vienna.
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James Cumming
1777 - 1861 (84 years)
James Cumming was the ninth Professor of Chemistry in Cambridge from 1815 to 1860. Cumming is remembered for his research-led teaching and his lectures during which he would literally shock the audience with a galvanic apparatus. He was also known to electrocute a cat during a demonstration.
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William Arthur Bone
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
William Arthur Bone, FRS was a British fuel technologist and chemist. Biography Bone was born in Stockton-on-Tees, the son of Christopher Bone, a tea merchant, and his wife Mary Elizabeth. He was educated at Middlesbrough High School, the Ackworth Quaker school and Stockton High School. After a year at the Leys School, Cambridge he studied Chemistry and Physics at Owens College, Manchester , followed by a scholarship year at the University of Heidelberg.
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James Woodhouse
1770 - 1809 (39 years)
James Woodhouse was an American surgeon and chemist. Biography He was the son of English emigrants to the United States. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1787, and from its medical department in 1792. In 1791 he served as a surgeon in General Arthur St. Clair's expedition against the western Indians. When Joseph Priestley declined to accept the chair of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1795, Woodhouse received the appointment, which he held until his death.
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H. C. Zen
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
H. C. Zen was a Chinese politician, academic and educator who served as president of National Sichuan University from 1935–1937. He was a professor of Chemistry and served as vice president of what is now Nanjing University from 1923–1925. He was a founding member of the Science Society of China, a major science organization in the modern history of China initiated by Chinese students at Cornell University in 1914, and served as its president from 1914 to 1923.
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Heinrich Debus
1824 - 1916 (92 years)
#6628
Hieronymous Theodor Richter
1824 - 1898 (74 years)
Hieronymus Theodor Richter was a German chemist. He was born in Dresden. In 1863, while working at the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, he co-discovered indium with Ferdinand Reich. He was also a member of the student fraternity "Corps Saxo-Borussia Freiberg". In 1875, he became the director of the Mining Academy in Freiberg.
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Robert Empie Rogers
1813 - 1884 (71 years)
Robert Empie Rogers was a United States chemist. Biography Rogers was born in Baltimore, Maryland on March 29, 1813. The youngest of four brothers, he was educated first under the care of his father, and then by his elder brothers. It was intended that he should be a civil engineer, and for a time he acted as assistant in the survey of the Boston and Providence Railroad, but he abandoned this in 1833.
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Francis Patrick Dwyer
1910 - 1962 (52 years)
Francis Patrick John Dwyer FAA was Professor of Chemistry, Australian National University, Canberra. He was one of the most distinguished scientists Australia has produced. At the time of his death in 1962 he was widely recognised as a leading authority in inorganic chemistry, and had laid the foundation in Australia for a new field of research bridging science and medicine—biological inorganic chemistry. His influence as a teacher and as a researcher was widespread.
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Jacques-Louis Soret
1827 - 1890 (63 years)
Jacques-Louis Soret was a Swiss chemist and spectroscopist. He studied both spectroscopy and electrolysis. Career Soret held the chairs of chemistry and medical physics at the University of Geneva.
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Robert Hare
1781 - 1858 (77 years)
Robert Hare was an early American chemist and professor. Biography Hare was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 17, 1781. He developed and experimented with the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, with Edward Daniel Clarke of Oxford, shortly after 1800. He married Harriett Clark and had six children. In 1802, Hare was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. He was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania between 1810 and 1812 and between 1818 and 1847. By the 1820s, Hare had developed the "galvanic deflagrator", a type of voltaic battery having large plates used for producing rapid and powerful combustion.
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John Christopher Draper
1835 - 1885 (50 years)
John Christopher Draper was an American chemist and surgeon. He was a son of multidisciplinary scientist John William Draper and a brother of astronomer Henry Draper. Life and work Draper was born at Christiansville . His father, John William Draper, was an accomplished doctor, chemist, astronomer, botanist, and professor at New York University. Draper's mother, Antonia Coetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, was a daughter of the personal physician to the John VI of Portugal and Charlotte of Spain.
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Josef Redtenbacher
1810 - 1870 (60 years)
Josef Redtenbacher was an Austrian chemist born in Kirchdorf an der Krems, Upper Austria. He was a brother to entomologist Ludwig Redtenbacher . He studied medicine and botany at the University of Vienna, and was influenced by the work of mineralogist Friedrich Mohs. After graduation, he remained in Vienna as an assistant to chemist Joseph Franz von Jacquin. He later travelled to Germany, where he studied mineralogy under Heinrich Rose in Berlin and organic chemistry with Justus von Liebig at the University of Giessen.
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Boris Rajewsky
1893 - 1974 (81 years)
Boris Rajewsky was a Russian-born German biophysicist, who was one of the most influential researchers on the impact of radiation on living organisms in the 20th century. He served as Rector of the Goethe University Frankfurt from 1949 to 1951.
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Oswald Schmiedeberg
1838 - 1921 (83 years)
Johann Ernst Oswald Schmiedeberg was a Baltic German pharmacologist. In 1866 he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Dorpat with a thesis concerning the measurement of chloroform in blood, before becoming the first professor of pharmacology at the University of Strasbourg, where he remained for 46 years.
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Agnes Fay Morgan
1884 - 1968 (84 years)
Agnes Fay Morgan was an American chemist and academic. She was the longtime chair of the home economics program at the University of California. Her program was strongly grounded in science, and students admitted into the program were required to have a level of science education that was not typical of home economics programs at the time. Morgan was one of the earliest married female college professors in the United States.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Hermann Delffs
1812 - 1894 (82 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Hermann Delffs was a German chemist. He studied natural sciences at the University of Kiel, receiving his doctorate in 1834. In 1840 he obtained his habilitation at the University of Heidelberg, where in 1843 he became an associate professor. From 1853 he was a full professor of chemistry at Heidelberg, being given the status of professor emeritus in 1889. At Heidelberg he gave classes in pharmaceutical, organic and physiological chemistry.
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Heinrich Bertsch
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Heinrich Gottlob Bertsch was a German chemist. He is considered the inventor of the world's first fully synthetic detergent. Life The son of an elementary school teacher, he attended the Oberrealschule in Ludwigsburg, where he graduated from high school in 1916. After his military service in World War I, he studied chemical technology from 1919 at the Technical University of Stuttgart and completed his studies with a diploma examination in 1921 and a doctorate in engineering in 1922. After initial positions in Stuttgart and Dresden, he took up a position as a chemist at H. Th. Böhme AG in Chemnitz on 1 August 1924, where he initially researched in the field of textile auxiliaries.
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Stéphane Leduc
1853 - 1939 (86 years)
Stéphane Leduc was a French biologist who sought to contribute to understanding of the chemical and physical mechanisms of life. He was a scientist in the fledgling field of synthetic biology, particularly in relation to diffusion and osmosis. He was a professor at the École de Médecine de Nantes and worked on osmotic crystallisation and the physiological effects of electric current. He was an Officier de la Légion d'honneur.
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Heinrich Wilhelm Ferdinand Wackenroder
1798 - 1854 (56 years)
Heinrich Wilhelm Ferdinand Wackenroder was a German chemist. Career and work In June, 1826 Wackenroder published his doctoral dissertation, “On Anthelminthics in the Vegetable Kingdom,” presented to Göttingen University, which earned him praise, and the Royal Prize.
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Tomas Batuecas
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Tomás Batuecas Marugán was a Spanish chemist, most notable for his work on atomic weights of the elements. Batuecas was a professor of chemistry and vice-chancellor of the University of Santiago de Compostela.
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John Kidd
1775 - 1851 (76 years)
John Kidd was an English physician, chemist and geologist who took a leading role in Oxford's "scientific awakening" in the early years of the nineteenth century. Biography Kidd was born in Westminster, the son of a naval officer, and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He became reader in chemistry at Oxford in 1801, and in 1803 was elected the first Aldrichian Professor of Chemistry. He then voluntarily gave courses of lectures on mineralogy and geology. These were delivered in the dark chambers under the Ashmolean Museum, where William Conybeare, William Buckland, Charles Daubeny and others gained their first lessons in geology.
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Alexander Nicolaus Scherer
1771 - 1824 (53 years)
Alexander Nicolaus Scherer was a Russian-German chemist and pharmacologist. In 1794 he graduated from the University of Jena, later serving as a lecturer at the gymnasium in Weimar. In 1800 he was appointed a professor of physics at the University of Halle, shortly afterwards working as a manager at a stoneware factory in Potsdam. In 1803 he relocated to the University of Dorpat as a professor of chemistry, and during the following year returned to St. Petersburg as a professor of chemistry and pharmacy at the medico-surgical academy. In 1815 he became a full member of the St. Petersburg Acad...
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C. P. Snow
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, was an English novelist and physical chemist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government. He is best known for his series of novels known collectively as Strangers and Brothers, and for The Two Cultures, a 1959 lecture in which he laments the gulf between scientists and "literary intellectuals".
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George Wilson
1818 - 1859 (41 years)
George Wilson PRSSA FRSE was a 19th-century Scottish chemist and author. He was Regius Professor of Technology at the University of Edinburgh, and the first Director of the Industrial Museum of Scotland.
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Henry Paul Talbot
1864 - 1927 (63 years)
Henry Paul Talbot was an American chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He made a significant contribution to the university's reputation in research and teaching. Life Talbot earned a bachelor's degree in analytical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1885. He then worked as a scientific assistant, then as an analytical chemistry instructor at MIT and then continued is education at the Leipzig University. There he earned his Ph.D. in 1890, studying organic and physical chemistry. He then returned to MIT to continue working as an instructor.
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Johann Schweigger
1779 - 1857 (78 years)
Johann Salomo Christoph Schweigger was a German chemist, physicist, and professor of mathematics born in Erlangen. J.S.C.Schweigger was the son of Friedrich Christian Lorenz Schweigger, professor of theologie in Erlangen . He studied philosophy in Erlangen. His PhD involved the Homeric Question revived at that time by Friedrich August Wolf. Johann Tobias Mayer, Georg Friedrich Hildebrandt and Karl Christian von Langsdorf convinced him to switch to physics and chemistry and he lectured on this subjects in Erlangen until 1803 before taking a position as schoolteacher in Bayreuth and in 1811 in Nuremberg.
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Julius Tröger
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Julius Tröger was a German chemist. Tröger studied at the University of Leipzig from 1882 till 1888. During his Ph.D. he synthesized in 1887 2,8-dimethyl-6H,12H-5,11-methanodibenzo-[b,f][1,5]diazocine from p-toluidine and formaldehyde. This substance is now known as the Tröger's base. Because he was not able to give a structure of the new compound Johannes Wislicenus, the new director of the department, assigned a mediocre grade for Trögers thesis. It took another 48 years to confirm the structure of Tröger's base. In 1888 he started working at the Braunschweig University of Technology where he stayed until his retirement in 1928.
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Alexander Vinogradov
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Alexander Pavlovich Vinogradov was a Soviet geochemist, academician , and Hero of Socialist Labour . In 1928, he took up a position as assistant professor in the laboratory for biogeochemical problems of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
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