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
Boris Nikolsky
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Boris Petrovich Nikolsky , , was a Soviet chemist who played a crucial role in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. Besides his work on the plutonium chemistry, Nikolsky did a pioneering work in ion exchanges applications in radiochemistry and physical chemistry, and was a professor of chemistry at the Leningrad University . He academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
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Karl von Auwers
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Karl Friedrich von Auwers was a German chemist, and was the academic adviser of both Karl Ziegler and Georg Wittig at the University of Marburg. Life Karl Friedrich von Auwers was born the son of the renowned astronomer Arthur Auwers on in Gotha, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. He studied at first at the University of Heidelberg and later with August Wilhelm von Hofmann at the University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1885. After one further year with Hofmann he joined the group of Victor Meyer at the University of Göttingen and later at the University of Heidelberg. He stayed at Heidelberg until he became professor at the University of Greifswald in 1900.
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Farrington Daniels
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Farrington Daniels was an American physical chemist who is considered one of the pioneers of the modern direct use of solar energy. Biography Daniels was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 8, 1889. Daniels began day school in 1895 at the Kenwood School and then on to Douglas School. As a boy, he was fascinated with Thomas Edison, Samuel F. B. Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and John Charles Fields. He decided early that he wanted to be an electrician and inventor. He attended Central and East Side high schools. By this point he liked chemistry and physics, but equally enjoyed "Manual Train...
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Frank C. Whitmore
1887 - 1947 (60 years)
Frank Clifford Whitmore , nicknamed "Rocky", was a prominent chemist who submitted significant evidence for the existence of carbocation mechanisms in organic chemistry. He was born in 1887 in the town of North Attleborough, Massachusetts.
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Cato Maximilian Guldberg
1836 - 1902 (66 years)
Cato Maximilian Guldberg was a Norwegian mathematician and chemist. Guldberg is best known as a pioneer in physical chemistry. Background Guldberg was born in Christiania , Norway. He was the eldest son of Carl August Guldberg and Hanna Sophie Theresia Bull . He was the brother of nurse and educator Cathinka Guldberg as well as mathematician Axel Sophus Guldberg. He attended Aug. Holths private latinskole in Christiania. Guldberg studied mathematics and physics at the University of Christiania and took his diploma in 1859. That same year he received the Crown Prince's gold medal for a dissertation in pure mathematics.
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William Christopher Zeise
1789 - 1847 (58 years)
William Christopher Zeise was a Danish organic chemist. He is best known for synthesising one of the first organometallic compounds, named Zeise's salt in his honour. He also performed pioneering studies in organosulfur chemistry, discovering the xanthates in 1823.
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Friedrich Stromeyer
1776 - 1835 (59 years)
Prof Friedrich Stromeyer FRS FRSE was a German chemist. He was the discoverer of cadmium. From 1982 a Friedrich Stromeyer Prize has been awarded for chemical achievement in Germany. Life He was born in Göttingen on 2 August 1776 the eldest son of Dr Ernerst Johann Friedrich Stromeyer, professor of medicine at Göttingen University, and his wife, Marie Magdalena Johanne von Blum.
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Thomas Thomson
1773 - 1852 (79 years)
Thomas Thomson MD was a Scottish chemist and mineralogist whose writings contributed to the early spread of Dalton's atomic theory. His scientific accomplishments include the invention of the saccharometer and he gave silicon its current name. He served as president of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow.
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John Frederic Daniell
1790 - 1845 (55 years)
John Frederic Daniell FRS was an English chemist and physicist. Biography Daniell was born in London. In 1831 he became the first professor of chemistry at the newly founded King's College London; and in 1835 he was appointed to the equivalent post at the East India Company's Military Seminary at Addiscombe, Surrey. His name is best known for his invention of the Daniell cell, an element of an electric battery much better than voltaic cells. He also invented the dew-point hygrometer known by his name, and a register pyrometer; and in 1830 he erected in the hall of the Royal Society a water-barometer, with which he carried out a large number of observations.
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Heinrich Gustav Magnus
1802 - 1870 (68 years)
Heinrich Gustav Magnus was a notable German experimental scientist. His training was mostly in chemistry but his later research was mostly in physics. He spent the great bulk of his career at the University of Berlin, where he is remembered for his laboratory teaching as much as for his original research. He did not use his first given name, and was known throughout his life as Gustav Magnus.
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Carl Auer von Welsbach
1858 - 1929 (71 years)
Carl Auer von Welsbach , who received the Austrian noble title of Freiherr Auer von Welsbach in 1901, was an Austrian scientist and inventor, who separated didymium into the elements neodymium and praseodymium in 1885. He was also one of three scientists to independently discover the element lutetium , separating it from ytterbium in 1907, setting off the longest priority dispute in the history of chemistry.
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Nils Löfgren
1913 - 1967 (54 years)
Nils Löfgren was a Swedish chemist who developed the anaesthetic Lidocaine in 1943. At this time, he had recently finished his licentiate degree, and was teaching organic chemistry at the University of Stockholm. He and his co-worker Bengt Lundqvist sold the rights to Xylocaine to the Swedish pharmaceutical company Astra AB.
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Joseph O. Hirschfelder
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project and in the creation of the nuclear bomb. Biography Hirschfelder was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a Jewish couple, Arthur Douglas and May Rosalie . He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota from 1927 to 1929 and at Yale University from 1929 to 1931. Hirschfelder received doctorates in physics and chemistry from Princeton University under the direction of Eugene Wigner, Henry Eyring and Hugh Stott Taylor. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with John von Neumann for a year after his PhD at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand
1826 - 1897 (71 years)
Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand was a Swedish mineralogist and chemist. He was a professor at the University of Lund from 1862-1895, where he isolated the element niobium in 1864. He developed an early version of the periodic table and made advances in understanding the chemistry of coordination compounds. Blomstrand published textbooks in chemistry and was well-known internationally for his scientific contributions.
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Francis Simon
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Sir Francis Simon , was a German and later British physical chemist and physicist who devised the gaseous diffusion method, and confirmed its feasibility, of separating the isotope Uranium-235 and thus made a major contribution to the creation of the atomic bomb.
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Primo Levi
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man , his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table , a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element as it played a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
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Abu Bakr al-Razi
866 - 925 (59 years)
Abū Bakr al-Rāzī , , often known as Razi or by his Latin name Rhazes, also rendered Rhasis, was a physician, philosopher and alchemist who lived during the Islamic Golden Age. He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of medicine, and also wrote on logic, astronomy and grammar. He is also known for his criticism of religion, especially with regard to the concepts of prophethood and revelation. However, the religio-philosophical aspects of his thought, which also included a belief in five "eternal principles", are only recorded by authors who were often hostile t...
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Charles F. Chandler
1836 - 1925 (89 years)
Charles Frederick Chandler was an American chemist, best known for his regulatory work in public health, sanitation, and consumer safety in New York City, as well as his work in chemical education—first at Union College and then, for the majority of his career, at Columbia University, where he taught in the Chemical Department, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and served as the first Dean of Columbia University's School of Mines.
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Otto Linné Erdmann
1804 - 1869 (65 years)
Otto Linné Erdmann was a German chemist. He was the son of Karl Gottfried Erdmann, the physician who introduced vaccination into Saxony. He was born in Dresden on 11 April 1804. In 1820 he began to attend the medico-chirurgical academy of his native place, and in 1822 he entered the University of Leipzig, where in 1827 he became an associate professor, and in 1830 a full professor of chemistry. This office he held until his death, which happened at Leipzig on 9 October 1869.
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Charles Loring Jackson
1845 - 1935 (90 years)
Charles Loring Jackson was the first significant organic chemist in the United States. He brought organic chemistry to the United States from Germany and educated a generation of American organic chemists.
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Theodor Förster
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Theodor Förster was a German physical chemist known for theoretical work on light-matter interaction in molecular systems such as fluorescence and resonant energy transfer. Education and career Förster studied at the University of Frankfurt and received his Ph.D. at the age of only 23 under Erwin Madelung in 1933. In the same year he joined the Nazi Party and the SA. He then joined Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer as a research assistant at the Leipzig University, where he worked closely with Peter Debye, Werner Heisenberg, and Hans Kautzky. Förster obtained his habilitation in 1940 and became a lecturer at the Leipzig University.
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Cornelis Adriaan Lobry van Troostenburg de Bruyn
1857 - 1904 (47 years)
Cornelis Adriaan Lobry van Troostenburg de Bruyn was a chemist from the Netherlands. Biography De Bruyn was born on in Leeuwarden, where his father, Nicholaas Lobry van Troostenburg de Bruyn, was a physician in practice. The boy was in due time sent to the high school of the town , and subsequently for a year to a gymnasium. In 1875, he entered the University of Leiden, and in 1883, while acting as assistant to Professor Franchimont, he produced his dissertation and obtained his doctorate. The subject of this thesis was the interaction of the three dinitrobenzenes with potassium cyanide in al...
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Ernest Fourneau
1872 - 1949 (77 years)
Ernest Fourneau was a French pharmacist who graduated in 1898 for the Paris university specialist in medicinal chemistry and pharmacology. He played a major role in the discovery of synthetic local anesthetics such as amylocaine, as well as in the synthesis of suramin. He authored more than two hundred scholarly works, and has been described as having "helped to establish the fundamental laws of chemotherapy that have saved so many human lives".
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Raluca Ripan
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Raluca Ripan was a Romanian chemist, and a titular member of the Romanian Academy. She wrote many treatises, especially in the field of analytical chemistry. Biography She was born in Iași, in the Moldavia region of Romania; her parents were Constantin and Smaranda Ripan, both originally from Huși. She attended the local girl's high school, after which she enrolled in the Faculty of Science of the University of Iași, graduating in 1919. For her graduate studies she went to the University of Cluj in Transylvania, obtaining her PhD in 1922 under the direction of Gheorghe Spacu, with thesis "Double amines corresponding to double sulphates in the magnesium series".
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Jan Czochralski
1885 - 1953 (68 years)
Jan Czochralski was a Polish chemist who invented the Czochralski method, which is used for growing single crystals and in the production of semiconductor wafers. It is still used in over 90 percent of all electronics in the world that use semiconductors. He is the most cited Polish scholar.
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Johann Wilhelm Ritter
1776 - 1810 (34 years)
Johann Wilhelm Ritter was a German chemist, physicist and philosopher. He was born in Samitz near Haynau in Silesia , and died in Munich. Life and work Johann Wilhelm Ritter's first involvement with science began when he was 14 years old. He became an apprentice to an apothecary in Liegnitz , and acquired a deep interest in chemistry. He began medicine studies at the University of Jena in 1796. A self-taught scientist, he made many experimental researches on chemistry, electricity and other fields.
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Johann Friedrich Gmelin
1748 - 1804 (56 years)
Johann Friedrich Gmelin was a German naturalist, chemist, botanist, entomologist, herpetologist, and malacologist. Education Johann Friedrich Gmelin was born as the eldest son of Philipp Friedrich Gmelin in 1748 in Tübingen. He studied medicine under his father at University of Tübingen and graduated with a Master's degree in 1768, with a thesis entitled: , defended under the presidency of Ferdinand Christoph Oetinger, whom he thanks with the words .
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Roland Scholl
1865 - 1945 (80 years)
Roland Heinrich Scholl was a Swiss chemist who taught at various European universities. Among his most notable achievements are the synthesis of coronene, the co-development of the Bally-Scholl synthesis, and various discoveries about polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
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Lawrence O. Brockway
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Lawrence Olin Brockway was a physical chemist who spent most of his career at the University of Michigan, where he developed early methods for electron diffraction. Early life and education Brockway was born on September 23, 1907, in Topeka, Kansas. He attended the University of Nebraska and received his B.S. in 1929 and his M.S. a year later. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology, where he was one of the first graduate students of Linus Pauling. He and Pauling were interested in the physics of interatomic interactions and focused their efforts on the structure of chalcopyri...
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Wilhelm Biltz
1877 - 1943 (66 years)
Wilhelm Biltz was a German chemist and scientific editor. In addition to his scholarly work, Biltz is noted for commanding the principal German tank involved in the first ever tank-on-tank battle in history at the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux.
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John Ulric Nef
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
John Ulric Nef was a Swiss-born American chemist and the discoverer of the Nef reaction and Nef synthesis. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
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Heinrich Limpricht
1827 - 1909 (82 years)
Heinrich Limpricht was a German chemist. Limpricht was a pupil of Friedrich Wöhler; he worked on the chemistry of furans and pyrroles, discovering furan in 1870. In 1852 he became lecturer and in 1855 extraordinary professor at the University of Göttingen. In 1860, he became ordinary professor at the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the University of Greifswald. His oldest daughter Marie married in 1875 to Protestant theologian Julius Wellhausen.
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Fritz Feigl
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Fritz Feigl was a Jewish Austrian-born chemist. He taught at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Biography Feigl was born and studied in Vienna, but owing to his military service in the First World War he had to interrupt his studies. He received his Ph.D. for work with Wilhelm Schlenk in 1920. After his habilitation in 1928 he became a professor at the University of Vienna. He was forced to retire after the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938.
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Samuel William Johnson
1830 - 1909 (79 years)
Samuel William Johnson was an American agricultural chemist. He promoted the movement to bring the sciences to the aid of American farmers through agricultural experiment stations and education in agricultural science.
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Donald L. Katz
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Donald Laverne Katz was an American chemist and chemical engineer. The 1983 National Medal of Science was presented to Katz by President Ronald Reagan "for solving many practical engineering problems by delving into a wide group of sciences and making their synergistic effects evident." Katz was also noted for developing a hazard rating system for dangerous bulk cargoes. The New York Times called Katz an "oil expert". The National Academy of Engineering called him a "world leader" in reservoir engineering.
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Heinrich Hörlein
1882 - 1954 (72 years)
Philipp Heinrich Hörlein , was a German entrepreneur, scientist, lecturer, and Nazi Wehrwirtschaftsführer. He was tried for war crimes for his involvement in the Holocaust and his knowledge of medical experimentation on concentration camp prisoners, but he was ultimately acquitted and released.
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Alfred Wohl
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Alfred Wohl was a German chemist. Several chemical reactions are named after him, including the Wohl degradation, Wohl-Aue reaction and the Wohl-Ziegler reaction. Life Wohl studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg from 1882 until 1886. He received his Ph.D 1886 for work on Hexamethylenetetramine with August Wilhelm von Hofmann. He became an assistant of Hermann Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin from 1886 until 1891, where he also received his habilitation. He became professor at the University of Berlin in 1901, but he left for the Technical University of Danzig in 1904. He retired because of antisemitic pressure in 1933, but worked in his lab until 1937.
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Friedrich Hoffmann
1660 - 1742 (82 years)
Friedrich Hoffmann or Hofmann was a German physician and chemist. He is also sometimes known in English as Frederick Hoffmann. Life His family had been connected with medicine for 200 years before him. Born in Halle, he attended the local gymnasium where he acquired that taste for and skill in mathematics to which he attributed much of his later success. Beginning at age 18, he studied medicine at the University of Jena. From there, in 1680, he went to Erfurt, to attend Kasper Cramer's lectures on chemistry. Next year, returning to Jena, he received his doctor's diploma, and, after publishing a thesis, was permitted to teach.
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Sergey Nametkin
1876 - 1950 (74 years)
Sergey Semyonovich Nametkin was a Soviet and Russian organic chemist, a prominent researcher in terpene chemistry, the cracking of petrochemicals, and rearrangement of camphenes. Biography Nametkin was born in Kazan and orphaned at an early age. He was educated at a gymnasium in Moscow, after which he earned a living as a private tutor. He studied chemistry and became a lecturer in organic chemistry at the Moscow University but quit in 1911 to oppose the policies of L.A. Kasso. He then studied under N.D. Zelinsky, and received a doctorate in 1917. In 1927 he went to the Moscow Mining Academy ...
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Paul Schlack
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Paul Schlack was a German chemist. He completed his studies at the Technical University of Stuttgart in 1921 and worked as a research chemist in Copenhagen for a year, before returning to Stuttgart. He received his PhD in 1924. Around this time he developed a keen interest in amide chemistry. He synthesized Nylon 6, widely known by its tradename Perlon, on 29 January 1938 whilst working for IG Farben.
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Ivan Ostromislensky
1880 - 1939 (59 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Ostromislensky was a Russian organic chemist. He is credited as the pioneer in studying polymerization of synthetic rubber as well as inventor of various industrial technologies for production of synthetic rubber, polymers and pharmaceuticals.
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Hermann Wilhelm Vogel
1834 - 1898 (64 years)
Hermann Wilhelm Vogel was a German photochemist and photographer who discovered dye sensitization, which is of great importance to photography. Academic career After finishing school in Frankfurt , he studied at the Royal Industrial Institute of Berlin, earning his Ph.D. with Karl Friedrich August Rammelsberg in 1863. Vogel's thesis, which was published in Poggendorffs Annalen , had the title: Über das Verhalten des Chlorsilbers, Bromsilbers und Iodsilbers im Licht und die Theorie der Photographie . This marked the beginning of his research into the photographic process.
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Johann Friedrich August Göttling
1755 - 1809 (54 years)
Johann Friedrich August Göttling was a notable German chemist. Gottling developed and sold chemical assay kits and studied processes for extracting sugar from beets to supplement his meagre university salary. He studied the chemistry of sulphur, arsenic, phosphorus, and mercury. He wrote texts on analytical chemistry and studied oxidation of organic compounds by nitric acid. He was one of the first scientists in Germany to take a stand against the phlogiston hypothesis and be in favor of the new chemistry of Lavoisier.
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Aleksei Chichibabin
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Alekséy Yevgényevich Chichibábin was a Soviet/Russian organic chemist, born , Kuzemin village, current Sumy Oblast, Ukraine, died in Paris, France, 15 August 1945. His name is also written Alexei Yevgenievich Chichibabin and Alexei Euguenievich Tchitchibabine.
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Adolf Pinner
1842 - 1909 (67 years)
Adolf Pinner was a German chemist. Early life and education He was educated at the Jewish Theological Seminary at Breslau and at the University of Berlin . In 1871, he became privat-docent at the University of Berlin. In 1873, he became assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin, and in 1874 professor of chemistry at the veterinary college of that city. In 1884, he was appointed a member of the German patent office, and in the following year, of the technical division of the Prussian Department of Commerce. He has received the title "Geheimer Regierungsrat".
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Adolf Miethe
1862 - 1927 (65 years)
Adolf Miethe was a German scientist, lens designer, photochemist, photographer, author and educator. He co-invented the first practical photographic flash and made important contributions to the progress of practical color photography.
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Rudolf Brill
1899 - 1989 (90 years)
Rudolf Friedrich Heinrich Erhard Ernst Brill was a German chemist. Education and career Brill was born in Eschwege in 1899 as the son of a businessman. From 1918 to 1922, he studied chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin. On May 13, 1922, he earned the diploma in engineering here. On October 15, 1923, he was promoted to PhD with the dissertation title Röntgenographische Untersuchungen. Ein Beitrag zur chemischen Konstitution des Seidenfibroins. His supervisor was Reginald Oliver Herzog at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
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Carl Schmidt
1822 - 1894 (72 years)
Carl Ernst Heinrich Schmidt , also known in Russia as Karl Genrikhovich Schmidt , was a Baltic German chemist from the Governorate of Livonia, a part of the Russian Empire. Biography Schmidt received his PhD in 1844 from the University of Gießen under Justus von Liebig. In 1845, he first announced the presence in the test of some Ascidians of what he called "tunicine", a substance very similar to cellulose. Tunicine now is regarded as cellulose and correspondingly a remarkable substance to find in an animal.
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Heinrich Biltz
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
Heinrich Biltz was a German chemist and professor. Life and career Heinrich Biltz was the son of Karl Friedrich Biltz who was a literary scholar and theatre critic His brother Wilhelm Biltz was also a noted chemist.
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Thomas Andrews
1813 - 1885 (72 years)
Thomas Andrews FRS FRSE was an Irish chemist and physicist who did important work on phase transitions between gases and liquids. He was a longtime professor of chemistry at Queen's University of Belfast.
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