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,
#6751
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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Charles Frederick Burgess
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Charles Frederick Burgess was an American chemist and engineer. He was founder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison department of Chemical Engineering in 1905, and was a pioneer in the development of electrochemical engineering in the United States. In 1917 he founded the Burgess Battery Company.
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Julia Southard Lee
1897 - Present (129 years)
Julia Southard Lee was an American textile chemist known for her teaching positions and research on protein fibers and textile quality. Early life and education Lee was born in Southard, Missouri on September 29, 1897. She attended the University of Missouri for her undergraduate education and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1926. She then attended Kansas State University and earned her master's degree in 1929. For her doctorate, she attended the University of Chicago and graduated in 1936. While at the University of Chicago, she received a fellowship in home economics named after Ellen Swallow Richards.
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Hermann von Fehling
1812 - 1885 (73 years)
Hermann von Fehling was a German chemist, famous as the developer of Fehling's solution used for estimation of sugar. Biography Hermann von Fehling was born in Lübeck. With the intention of taking up pharmacy he entered Heidelberg University about 1835. After graduating he went to Gießen as preparateur to Justus von Liebig, with whom he elucidated the composition of paraldehyde and metaldehyde. In 1839, on Liebig's recommendation, he was appointed to the chair of chemistry in the polytechnic in Stuttgart, a position he held for over 45 years. He died in Stuttgart in 1885.
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Frank R. Mayo
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Frank R. Mayo was a research chemist who worked for a variety of companies and won the 1967 Award in Polymer Chemistry from the American Chemical Society due to his work on the Mayo–Lewis equation.
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Franz von Soxhlet
1848 - 1926 (78 years)
Franz Ritter von Soxhlet was a German agricultural chemist. Biography Franz von Soxhlet was born on 12 January 1848 in Brno, Austrian Empire. He invented the Soxhlet extractor in 1879 and in 1886 he proposed pasteurization be applied to milk and other beverages. Soxhlet is also known as the first scientist who fractionated the milk proteins in casein, albumin, globulin and lactoprotein. Furthermore, he described for the first time the sugar present in milk, lactose. The Soxhlet solution is an alternative to Fehling's solution for preparation of a comparable cupric/tartrate reagent to test for...
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Friedrich Oskar Giesel
1852 - 1927 (75 years)
Friedrich Oskar Giesel was a German organic chemist. During his work in a quinine factory in the late 1890s, he started to work on the at-that-time-new field of radiochemistry and started the production of radium. In the period between 1902 and 1904, he was able to isolate a new element emanium. In a now controversially reviewed process, it was stated that emanium is identical to actinium, which was discovered by André-Louis Debierne in 1899.
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Torbern Bergman
1735 - 1784 (49 years)
Torbern Olaf Bergman was a Swedish chemist and mineralogist noted for his 1775 Dissertation on Elective Attractions, containing the largest chemical affinity tables ever published. Bergman was the first chemist to use the A, B, C, etc., system of notation for chemical species.
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Georg Ludwig Carius
1829 - 1875 (46 years)
Georg Ludwig Carius was a German chemist born in Barbis, in the Kingdom of Hanover. He studied under Friedrich Wöhler and was assistant to Robert Bunsen for 6 years. He was Director of the Marburger Chemical Institute of Philipps University of Marburg from 1865. He is noted for the studies of oxidation for which he developed a method involving high temperature digestion in a sealed tube. Heavy wall sealed tubes, as used for digestion or thermolysis, are referred to as "Carius tubes". He also wrote a textbook on polybasic acids.
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Sima Lozanić
1847 - 1935 (88 years)
Simeon Milivoje Lozanić and Simeon "Sima" Lozanić was a Serbian chemist, president of the Serbian Royal Academy, the first rector of the University of Belgrade, minister of foreign affairs, minister of industry and diplomat. At the Grandes écoles and later when it transformed into the University of Belgrade he taught chemistry and electrosynthesis. He has published over 200 scientific papers and professional publications.
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Johannes Thiele
1865 - 1918 (53 years)
Friedrich Karl Johannes Thiele was a German chemist and a prominent professor at several universities, including those in Munich and Strasbourg. He developed many laboratory techniques related to isolation of organic compounds. In 1907 he described a device for the accurate determination of melting points, since named Thiele tube after him.
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Louis Daguerre
1787 - 1851 (64 years)
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter, scenic designer, and a developer of the diorama theatre.
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Friedrich Paneth
1887 - 1958 (71 years)
Friedrich Adolf Paneth was an Austrian-born British chemist. Fleeing the Nazis, he escaped to Britain. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1939. After the war, Paneth returned to Germany to become director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in 1953. He was considered the greatest authority of his time on volatile hydrides and also made important contributions to the study of the stratosphere.
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John Herschel
1792 - 1871 (79 years)
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet was an English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, and experimental photographer who invented the blueprint and did botanical work.
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Carl Wagner
1901 - 1977 (76 years)
Carl Wilhelm Wagner was a German Physical chemist. He is best known for his pioneering work on Solid-state chemistry, where his work on oxidation rate theory, counter diffusion of ions and defect chemistry led to a better understanding of how reactions take place at the atomic level. His life and achievements were honoured in a Solid State Ionics symposium commemorating his 100th birthday in 2001, where he was described as the Father of Solid State Chemistry.
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Samuel Glasstone
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Samuel Glasstone was a British-born American academic and writer of scientific books. He authored over 40 popular textbooks on physical chemistry and electrochemistry, reaction rates, nuclear weapons effects, nuclear reactor engineering, Mars, space sciences, the environmental effects of nuclear energy and nuclear testing.
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Wilhelm Schlenk
1879 - 1943 (64 years)
Wilhelm Johann Schlenk was a German chemist. He was born in Munich and also studied chemistry there. Schlenk succeeded Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin in 1919. Schlenk was an organic chemist who discovered organolithium compounds around 1917. He also investigated free radicals and carbanions and discovered that organomagnesium halides are capable of participating in a complex chemical equilibrium, now known as a Schlenk equilibrium.
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John Gamble Kirkwood
1907 - 1959 (52 years)
John "Jack" Gamble Kirkwood was a noted chemist and physicist, holding faculty positions at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and Yale University. Early life and background Kirkwood was born in Gotebo, Oklahoma, the oldest child of John Millard and Lillian Gamble Kirkwood. His father was educated as an attorney and was a distributor for the Goodyear Corporation in the state of Kansas. In addition to Jack Kirkwood, there were two younger sisters: Caroline and Margaret .
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Saul Winstein
1912 - 1969 (57 years)
Saul Winstein was a Jewish Canadian chemist who discovered the Winstein reaction. He argued a non-classical cation was needed to explain the stability of the norbornyl cation. This fueled a debate with Herbert C. Brown over the existence of σ-delocalized carbocations. Winstein also first proposed the concept of an intimate ion pair. He was co-author of the Grunwald–Winstein equation, concerning solvolysis rates.
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Felix Hoppe-Seyler
1825 - 1895 (70 years)
Ernst Felix Immanuel Hoppe-Seyler was a German physiologist and chemist, and the principal founder of the disciplines of biochemistry and molecular biology. He had discovered Yeast nucleic acid which is now called RNA in his attempts to follow up and confirm Miescher's results by repeating parts of Miescher's experiments
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Ivan Kablukov
1857 - 1942 (85 years)
Ivan Alekseyevich Kablukov was a Russian and Soviet physical chemist. He simultaneously and independently of Vladimir Kistiakovsky proposed the idea of ion solvation and initiated the unification of the physical and chemical theory of solutions. He published influential textbooks on organic chemistry and was a professor at Moscow State University and Timiryazev Agricultural Academy.
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