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
John Kenneth Stille
1930 - 1989 (59 years)
John Kenneth Stille was an American chemist who discovered the Stille reaction. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Arizona before serving in the Navy during the Korean War. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, where he studied under Carl Shipp Marvel. Stille began his independent career at the University of Iowa in 1957 before moving to Colorado State University in 1977.
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Treat Baldwin Johnson
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Treat Baldwin Johnson was an American organic chemist and Sterling Professor at Yale University from 1928–1943. Early life and education Treat Baldwin Johnson was born in Bethany, Connecticut, on 29 March 1875, the oldest of three sons of Dwight Lauren Johnson and Harriet Adeline Baldwin. He was educated at Ansonia high school and graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University in 1898, where he obtained work as a laboratory assistant and began a Ph.D. degree under the supervision of H L Wheeler. By the time of its completion in 1901, Johnson had published seven scientific p...
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James William McBain
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
James William McBain FRS was a Canadiann chemist. He gained a Master of Arts at Toronto University and a Doctor of Science at Heidelberg University. He carried out pioneering work in the area of micelles at the University of Bristol. As early as 1913 he postulated the existence of "colloidal ions", now known as micelles, to explain the good electrolytic conductivity of sodium palmitate solutions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 1923 He won their Davy Medal in 1939.
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Hugh Stott Taylor
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Sir Hugh Stott Taylor was an English chemist primarily interested in catalysis. In 1925, in a landmark contribution to catalytic theory, Taylor suggested that a catalysed chemical reaction is not catalysed over the entire solid surface of the catalyst but only at certain 'active sites' or centres. He also developed important methods for procuring heavy water during World War II and pioneered the use of stable isotopes in studying chemical reactions.
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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.
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James B. Sumner
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
James Batcheller Sumner was an American biochemist. He discovered that enzymes can be crystallized, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 with John Howard Northrop and Wendell Meredith Stanley. He was also the first to prove that enzymes are proteins.
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Joseph Edward Mayer
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Joseph Edward Mayer was a chemist who formulated the Mayer expansion in statistical field theory. He was professor of chemistry at the University of California San Diego from 1960 to 1972, and previously at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He was married to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer from 1930 until her death in 1972. He went to work with James Franck in Göttingen, Germany in 1929, where he met Maria, a student of Max Born. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and the American Philosophical Society .
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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...
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Emil Votoček
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Emil Votoček was a Czech chemist, composer and music theorist. He is noted for his chemistry textbooks and multilingual dictionaries in both chemistry and music. Chemistry career Votoček studied at the Czech Institute of Technology later in Mulhouse and received his PhD with Bernhard Tollens at the University of Göttingen for his chemistry of sugar.
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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...
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Yelavarthy Nayudamma
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Yelavarthy Nayudamma was a chemical engineer and a scientist killed on Air India Flight 182 . Early life and education Nayudamma was born on 10 September 1922 into an agricultural family at Yelavarru village near Tenali in Guntur district of present day Andhra Pradesh state in India. He was the eldest of three brothers and a sister. His parents Raghavamma and Anjaih named him Nayudammma . Nayudamma who was over 6 feet tall lived up to his name.
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William Giauque
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
William Francis Giauque was a Canadian-born American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized in 1949 for his studies in the properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero. He spent virtually all of his educational and professional career at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Willard Libby
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
Willard Frank Libby was an American physical chemist noted for his role in the 1949 development of radiocarbon dating, a process which revolutionized archaeology and palaeontology. For his contributions to the team that developed this process, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960.
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Jan Kok
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Jan Kok was a Dutch pharmacist. In 1945, he was appointed as professor at the University of Amsterdam, and between 1960 and 1964 he was rector magnificus of this university. External links Biography Prof. dr. J. Kok, 1899 - 1982 at the University of Amsterdam Album Academicum website
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Robert Burns Woodward
1917 - 1979 (62 years)
Robert Burns Woodward was an American organic chemist. He is considered by many to be the preeminent synthetic organic chemist of the twentieth century, having made many key contributions to the subject, especially in the synthesis of complex natural products and the determination of their molecular structure. He also worked closely with Roald Hoffmann on theoretical studies of chemical reactions. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965.
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Gilbert N. Lewis
1875 - 1946 (71 years)
Gilbert Newton Lewis was an American physical chemist and a dean of the college of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley. Lewis was best known for his discovery of the covalent bond and his concept of electron pairs; his Lewis dot structures and other contributions to valence bond theory have shaped modern theories of chemical bonding. Lewis successfully contributed to chemical thermodynamics, photochemistry, and isotope separation, and is also known for his concept of acids and bases. Lewis also researched on relativity and quantum physics, and in 1926 he coined the term "photon"...
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Charles Phelps Smyth
1895 - 1990 (95 years)
Charles Phelps "Charlie" Smyth was an American chemist. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University. From 1920 to 1963 he was a faculty member in the Princeton Department of Chemistry, and from 1963 to 1970 he was a consultant to the Office of Naval Research. He was awarded the Nichols Medal by the New York Section of the American Chemical Society in 1954.
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Roger Adams
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Roger Adams was an American organic chemist who developed the eponymous Adams' catalyst, and helped determine the composition of natural substances such as complex vegetable oils and plant alkaloids. He isolated and identified CBD in 1940. As head of the Chemistry department at the University of Illinois from 1926 to 1954, he influenced graduate education in America, taught over 250 Ph.D. students and postgraduate students, and served in military science during World War I and World War II.
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Walter Gordy
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Walter Gordy, was an American physicist best known for his experimental work in microwave spectroscopy. His laboratory at Duke University became a center for research in this field, and he authored one of the definitive books on the field.
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Nikolay Zelinsky
1861 - 1953 (92 years)
Nikolay Dmitriyevich Zelinsky was a Russian and Soviet chemist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union . Zelinsky studied at the University of Odessa and at the universities of Leipzig and Göttingen in Germany. Zelinsky was one of the founders of theory on organic catalysis. He was the inventor of the first effective filtering activated charcoal gas mask in the world .
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Oliver Patterson Watts
1865 - 1953 (88 years)
Oliver Patterson Watts was a professor of chemical engineering and applied electrochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Born in Thomaston, Maine, Watts received his bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in 1889. He received his doctoral degree in 1905; he was the first person to be awarded a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he served as a professor until 1935, after which he was an emeritus professor in the university's college of engineering. Watts is known for his development of the hot nickel plating bath known as the "Watts Bath", which he f...
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Melville Wolfrom
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Melville Lawrence Wolfrom was an American chemist. Early life, education, and career Melville Wolfrom's grandfather Johann Lorenz Wolfrum immigrated to the United States from Aš in 1854, and was of Sudeten German descent. His son Friedrich Wolfrum married Maria Louisa Sutter. Melville Wolfrom was born on April 2, 1900, the youngest of nine children. His father died when Melville was seven years old. Three of his brothers acquired a patent for a horse harness snap, and as a teen, Melville helped manufacture them out of the family home. He graduated from Ohio's Bellevue High School in 1917 as salutatorian and began working for the National Carbon Company.
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Arthur V. Tobolsky
1919 - 1972 (53 years)
Arthur Victor Tobolsky was a professor in the chemistry department at Princeton University known for teaching and research in polymer science and rheology. Personal Tobolsky was born in New York City in 1919. On September 7, 1972, Tobolsky died unexpectedly at the age of 53 on September 7, 1972, while attending a conference in Utica, N.Y.
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James Wilfred Cook
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Sir James Wilfred Cook FRS FRSE DSc LLD was an English chemist, best known for his research of organic chemistry of carcinogenic compounds. Friends knew him simply as Jim Cook. Life He was born in South Kensington in London on 10 December 1900, the son of Charles William Cook, a coachman, and his wife, Frances Wall. Using a London County Council scholarship he attended Sloane School in Chelsea, London.
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Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer
1899 - 1957 (58 years)
Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer was a German chemist. Education and career Born in Breslau, he was an older brother of martyred theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His father was neurologist Karl Bonhoeffer and his mother was Paula von Hase.
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Rose May Davis
1894 - Present (132 years)
Rose May Davis was an American chemist. In 1929 she became the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. from Duke University. Early life and education Rose May Davis was born on 17 November 1894 in Cumberland, Maryland, to Baptist Minister Quinton C. Davis and Sarah E. Davis. She studied a variety of subjects, such as music, law, and chemistry, and attended several institutions in pursuit of her education, including Chowan College , the Southern Conservatory of Music , Trinity College , the University of Virginia , Duke University . During her time at Trinity College, Davis was a member of the Panhellenic Council, the Chanticleer Board, Athena Literary Society, Eko-L, and Zeta Tau Alpha.
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George Wallace Kenner
1922 - 1978 (56 years)
George Wallace Kenner FRS was a British organic chemist. He was born in Sheffield in 1922, the son of Prof. James Kenner. During his childhood, he went to Didsbury Preparatory School in 1928 and moved to Manchester Grammar School in 1934. He was appointed to the first Heath Harrison Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool 1957–1976. He did his MSc and PhD degrees under Lord Todd at Manchester and Cambridge Universities in UK. He married Jillian Bird in 1951 and they had two daughters both born in Cambridge. He was faculty member at the Cambridge University for 15 years befor...
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Ray Wendland
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Ray Theodore Wendland was an American experimental chemist and academician. Education Wendland was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July, 1911, and educated at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, receiving a B.A. degree in chemistry in 1933. From there, he matriculated to Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, to pursue graduate studies. He was awarded a Ph.D. from that institution in 1937. Postdoctoral appointments followed at Carnegie Technical Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, centering on the refinement of rubber production under the auspices of the U.S.
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Theodor Svedberg
1884 - 1971 (87 years)
Theodor Svedberg was a Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate for his research on colloids and proteins using the ultracentrifuge. Svedberg was active at Uppsala University from the mid-1900s to late 1940s. While at Uppsala, Svedberg started as a docent before becoming the university's physical chemistry head in 1912. After leaving Uppsala in 1949, Svedberg was in charge of the Gustaf Werner Institute until 1967. Apart from his 1926 Nobel Prize, Svedberg was named a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1944 and became part of the National Academy of Sciences in 1945.
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Vladimir Engelgardt
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Engelgardt was a Soviet biochemist, academician of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences , academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences , and Hero of Socialist Labor . He was the founder and the first director of the Institute of Molecular Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences .
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Jean Piccard
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Jean Felix Piccard , also known as Jean Piccard, was a Swiss-born American chemist, engineer, professor and high-altitude balloonist. He invented clustered high-altitude balloons, and with his wife Jeannette, the plastic balloon. Piccard's inventions and co-inventions are used in balloon flight, aircraft and spacecraft.
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Hertha Sponer
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Hertha Sponer was a German physicist and chemist who contributed to modern quantum mechanics and molecular physics and was the first woman on the physics faculty of Duke University. She was the older sister of philologist and resistance fighter Margot Sponer.
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Wilhelm Steinkopf
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
Georg Wilhelm Steinkopf was a German chemist. Today he is mostly remembered for his work on the production of mustard gas during World War I. Life Georg Wilhelm Steinkopf was born on 28 June 1879 in Staßfurt, in the Prussian Province of Saxony in the German Empire, the son of Gustav Friedrich Steinkopf, a merchant, and his wife Elise Steinkopf .
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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...
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Anton Vilsmeier
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Dr. Anton Vilsmeier was a German chemist who together with Albrecht Haack discovered the Vilsmeier-Haack reaction. Early life Anton Vilsmeier was born to the mill owner, Wolfgang Vilsmeier, and his wife, Philomena, in Burgweinting, Oberpfalz. He attended the Volksschule and the Altes Gymnasium in Regensburg. During World War I, he served in the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, and became a British prisoner following the Battle of the Somme, returning to Germany in November 1919. From 1920, he studied chemistry at the University of Munich, and from 1922 at the University of Erlangen, where he ...
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S. P. L. Sørensen
1868 - 1939 (71 years)
Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen was a Danish chemist, known for the introduction of the concept of pH, a scale for measuring acidity and alkalinity. Personal life Sørensen was born in Havrebjerg Denmark in 1868 as the son of a farmer. He began his studies at the University of Copenhagen at the age of 18. He wanted to make a career in medicine, but under the influence of chemist Sophus Mads Jørgensen decided to change to chemistry.
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Hans Fischer
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Hans Fischer was a German organic chemist and the recipient of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Chemistry "for his researches into the constitution of haemin and chlorophyll and especially for his synthesis of haemin."
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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.
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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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