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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#6901
Robert J. Linhardt
Robert J. Linhardt is the Ann and John Broadbent, Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor Biocatalysis & Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His primary appointment at RPI is based in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, consisting of joint appointments with the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, Department of Biology, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center. He is highly cited in his field, with over 100 papers having each over 100 citations.
Go to Profile#6902
Erich Clar
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Erich Clar was an Austrian organic chemist who studied polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon chemistry. He is considered as the father of that field. In 1941, he authored "Aromatische Kohlenwasserstoffe" and in 1964 the greatly expanded two-volume Polycyclic Hydrocarbons, which described the syntheses, properties, and UV-visible absorption spectra of hundreds of PAHs. He discovered the Clar reaction of the cyclic ketone perinaphthenone to form dibenzo[cd,lm]perylene in a 400 C melt of zinc dust, zinc chloride, and sodium chloride. He created the Sextet Theory, now eponymously called Clar's rule, to describe the behavior of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon isomers.
Go to Profile#6903
Jerry Donohue
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Jerry Donohue was an American theoretical and physical chemist. He is best remembered for steering James D. Watson and Francis Crick towards the correct structure of DNA with some crucial information.
Go to Profile#6904
Frederick George Mann
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Frederick George Mann was a British organic chemist. Academic career He completed his doctoral studies at Downing College, Cambridge under Sir William Pope, graduating in 1923. He continued at Downing as an assistant lecturer until 1930, when he was appointed to a lectureship at Trinity College. He spent his entire academic career at Cambridge, retiring in 1964.
Go to Profile#6905
A. D. Walsh
1916 - 1977 (61 years)
Arthur Donald Walsh FRS FRSE FRIC was a British chemist, who served as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Dundee. He is usually referred to as Donald Walsh. He was the creator of the Walsh diagram and Walsh's Rules.
Go to Profile#6906
Paul L. Kirk
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Paul Leland Kirk was a biochemist, criminalist and participant in the Manhattan Project who was specialized in microscopy. He also investigated the bedroom in which Sam Sheppard supposedly murdered his wife and provided the key blood spatter evidence that led to his acquittal in a retrial over 12 years after the murder. The highest honor one can receive in the criminalistics section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences carries Kirk's name.
Go to Profile#6907
J. R. Partington
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
James Riddick Partington was a British chemist and historian of chemistry who published multiple books and articles in scientific magazines. His most famous works were An Advanced Treatise on Physical Chemistry and A History of Chemistry , for which he received the Dexter Award and the George Sarton Medal.
Go to Profile#6908
Shirō Akabori
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Shirō Akabori , 20 October 1900 – 3 November 1992 in Chihama, Ogasa , was a Japanese chemist and university professor, known for the Akabori amino-acid reactions. Life and education After graduating from public school, he began training as a pharmacist at Chiba medical school, now Chiba University, in 1918. After graduating in 1921, he joined the pharmaceutical company Momotani Juntenkan. The company hired him as an assistant to the chemist Nishizawa Yūshichi of the Imperial University of Tokyo, where he was taught by Ikeda Kikunae. In the summer of the same year, he followed Nishizawa for a short stay at the Tohoku Imperial University to learn organic chemistry from Majima Rikō.
Go to Profile#6909
Luis Federico Leloir
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Luis Federico Leloir was an Argentine physician and biochemist who received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the metabolic pathways by which carbohydrates are synthesized and converted into energy in the body. Although born in France, Leloir received the majority of his education at the University of Buenos Aires and was director of the private research group Fundación Instituto Campomar until his death in 1987. His research into sugar nucleotides, carbohydrate metabolism, and renal hypertension garnered international attention and led to significant progress in understanding, diagnosing and treating the congenital disease galactosemia.
Go to Profile#6910
Walther F. Goebel
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Walther Frederick Goebel was an American immunologist and an organic chemist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Goebel was known for his research of polysaccharides. Awards and distinctions member of the National Academy of Scienceshonorary degrees from Rockefeller University in 1978 and Middlebury College in 1959
Go to Profile#6911
Robert E. Rundle
1915 - 1963 (48 years)
Robert Eugene Rundle was an American chemist and crystallographer. He was a professor at Iowa State University and fellow of the American Physical Society. Early life and education Rundle was born in Orleans, Nebraska in 1915. He attended University of Nebraska where he completed a bachelor of science in 1937 and a master's degree in 1938. He completed a Ph.D. in 1941 at the California Institute of Technology. His advisors were Linus Pauling and J. Holmes Sturdivant.
Go to Profile#6912
Malcolm Dole
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Malcolm Dole was an American chemist known for the Dole Effect in which he proved that the atomic weight of oxygen in air is greater than that of oxygen in water and for his work on electrospray ionization, polymer chemistry, and electrochemistry.
Go to Profile#6913
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood
1897 - 1967 (70 years)
Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood was a British physical chemist and expert in chemical kinetics. His work in reaction mechanisms earned the 1956 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Education Born in London, his parents were Norman Macmillan Hinshelwood, a chartered accountant, and Ethel Frances née Smith. He was educated first in Canada, returning in 1905 on the death of his father to a small flat in Chelsea where he lived for the rest of his life. He then studied at Westminster City School and Balliol College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#6914
Arthur David Ritchie
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Arthur David Ritchie FRSE was a British chemical physiologist and philosopher. Life He was born Oxford on 22 June 1891 the son of Prof David George Ritchie. The family moved to St Andrews in 1894 when his father was given a new professorship there.
Go to Profile#6915
Arthur Lindo Patterson
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Arthur Lindo Patterson was a pioneering British X-ray crystallographer. Patterson was born to British parents in New Zealand in 1902. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Montreal, Canada and later to London, England. In 1920 Patterson moved to Canada for college at McGill University, Montreal. Firstly he concentrated on Mathematics and but then changed his major to Physics. He received his bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's in 1924. His master's thesis was on the production of hard X-rays by interaction of radium β rays with solids.
Go to Profile#6916
Yakov Zeldovich
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich , also known as YaB, was a leading Soviet physicist of Belarusian origin, who is known for his prolific contributions in physical cosmology, physics of thermonuclear reactions, combustion, and hydrodynamical phenomena.
Go to Profile#6917
Karl Freudenberg
1886 - 1983 (97 years)
Karl Johann Freudenberg was a German chemist who did early seminal work on the absolute configurations to carbohydrates, terpenes, and steroids, and on the structure of cellulose and other polysaccharides, and on the nature, structure, and biosynthesis of lignin. The Research Institute for the Chemistry of Wood and Polysaccharides at the University of Heidelberg was created for him in the mid to late 1930s, and he led this until 1969.
Go to Profile#6918
T. R. Seshadri
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Thiruvengadam Rajendram Seshadri FNA, FRS was an Indian chemist, academic, writer and the Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Delhi, known for his researches on the Indian medicinal and other plants. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, UK and an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Besides several articles, he also published two books, Chemistry of Vitamins and Hormones and Advancement of Scientific and Religious Culture in India. The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 1963, for his contribu...
Go to Profile#6919
Charles R. Hauser
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Charles Roy Hauser was an American chemist. Hauser was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a professor of chemistry at Duke University. Notable work The Sommelet–Hauser rearrangement is a named reaction based on the work of Hauser and Sommelet involving the rearrangement of certain benzyl quaternary ammonium salts. The reagent is sodium amide or another alkali metal amide and the reaction product a N,N-dialkylbenzylamine with a new alkyl group in the aromatic ortho position. For example, benzyltrimethylammonium iodide, [N3]I, rearranges in the presence of sodium amide to yield t...
Go to Profile#6920
John R. Johnson
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
John Raven Johnson was an American chemist. Johnson was notable, among other things, for the discovery of the nearly quantitative oxidation of organoboranes to alcohols by alkaline hydrogen peroxide. Johnson was Todd Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Cornell University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, chair of the Cornell Department of Chemistry.
Go to Profile#6921
Randy Read
1957 - 1983 (26 years)
Randy John Read is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and professor of protein crystallography at the University of Cambridge. Education Read was educated at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1979 followed by a PhD in 1986 for X-ray crystallography of serine proteases and their protein inhibitors supervised by Michael N. G. James.
Go to Profile#6922
Morris S. Kharasch
1895 - 1957 (62 years)
Morris Selig Kharasch was a pioneering organic chemist best known for his work with free radical additions and polymerizations. He defined the peroxide effect, explaining how an anti-Markovnikov orientation could be achieved via free radical addition. Kharasch was born in the Russian Empire in 1895 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 13. In 1919, he completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Chicago and spent most of his professional career there.
Go to Profile#6923
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.
Go to Profile#6924
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.
Go to Profile#6925
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"...
Go to Profile#6926
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.
Go to Profile#6927
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.
Go to Profile#6928
Edward Curtis Franklin
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Edward Curtis Franklin was an American chemist. Biography Edward Franklin was born in Geary County, Kansas. He entered the University of Kansas at the age of 22, obtaining his major in chemistry in 1888. Two years later he decided to study at the University of Berlin for one year, but abandon it by 1891. In 1892 he came back to State University where he remained till 1893 working as assistant chemist. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University where he received his doctorate in chemistry a year later. He then came back to University of Kansas where he spent one year as a chemist while the rest of the years he was an associate professor there.
Go to Profile#6929
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.
Go to Profile#6930
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.
Go to Profile#6931
William Houlder Zachariasen
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
William Houlder Zachariasen , more often known as W. H. Zachariasen, was a Norwegian-American physicist, specializing in X-ray crystallography and famous for his work on the structure of glass. Background Zachariasen was born in Langesund at Bamble in Telemark, Norway. He entered the University of Oslo in 1923, where he studied in the Mineralogical Institute. Zachariasen published his first article in 1925 when he was 19 years old, after having presented the contents of the article to the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in the preceding year. Over a span of 55 years he published over 200 scientific papers, many of which he was the sole author.
Go to Profile#6932
Izaak Kolthoff
1894 - 1993 (99 years)
Izaak Maurits Kolthoff was an analytical chemist and chemistry educator. He is widely considered the father of analytical chemistry for his large volume of published research in diverse fields of analysis, his work to modernize and promote the field, and for advising a large number of students who went on to influential careers of their own.
Go to Profile#6933
Franz Hein
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Franz Hein was a German scientist and artist. History Franz Hein was born in Grötzingen , Germany. His high school years were spent in Leipzig, as well as, his college years at the University of Leipzig. Hein completed his Ph.D. in 1917 on optical studies of bismuth and triphenylmethane derivatives. Hein made Assistant at the University and in 1920 Oberassistent. He continued working on his Habilitation becoming a professor in 1923. With the completion of his Habilitation, Hein went to work on organometallic system electrochemistry.
Go to Profile#6934
Samuel Cate Prescott
1872 - 1962 (90 years)
Samuel Cate Prescott was an American food scientist and microbiologist who was involved in the development of food safety, food science, public health, and industrial microbiology. Early life Prescott was born in South Hampton, New Hampshire, the younger of two children. An older sister, Grace, later became a teacher in South Hampton, located near the Amesbury, Massachusetts area, located across the New Hampshire-Massachusetts state line. His formal education was in an ungraded schoolhouse in New Hampshire. During his fifteenth year, Prescott served as a "rod man" on a surveying crew to lay o...
Go to Profile#6935
Arlie W. Schorger
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Arlie William Schorger was a chemical researcher and businessman who also did work in ornithology. His chemistry work of note largely involved wood and waterproofing. His only chemistry book was The chemistry of cellulose and wood, but he had 34 patents.
Go to Profile#6936
E. J. Bowen
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Edmund John Bowen FRS was a British physical chemist. Early life and wartime career E. J. Bowen was the eldest of four born to Edmund Riley Bowen and Lilias Bowen in 1898 in Worcester, England. He attended the Royal Grammar School Worcester.
Go to Profile#6937
Francis William Bergstrom
1897 - 1946 (49 years)
Francis William Bergstrom, Ph.D. was an American professor of chemistry at Stanford University. Bergstrom was born in Bloomington, Indiana on January 10, 1897, then moved to Stanford when he was 11 years old. He enrolled at Stanford and received a B.S. in 1918 and a Ph.D. in 1922, working with Edward Curtis Franklin. His postdoctoral work was undertaken at Clark University and Brown University, working with Charles A. Kraus. His independent career lasted 29 years at Stanford, during which time he wrote 70 peer-reviewed papers on nitrogen chemistry and served as an Associate Editor for The Jou...
Go to Profile#6938
Gerhard Krohn Rollefson
1900 - 1955 (55 years)
Gerhard Krohn Rollefson was a professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Background and career Rollefson received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His dissertation concerned Ebullioscopic constant measurement of mixed liquid media. He then completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Rollefson was a specialist in physical chemistry and studied the impact of X-ray radiation on a variety of materials. Rollefson published a book with Milton Burton in 1939: Photochemist...
Go to Profile#6939
Mary Elvira Weeks
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Mary Elvira Weeks was an American chemist and historian of science. Weeks was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Kansas and the first woman to be a faculty member there.
Go to Profile#6940
Nathaniel Oglesby Calloway
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Nathaniel Oglesby Calloway was an American chemist and physician. Calloway was the first African American to receive an academic doctorate from an institute west of the Mississippi River and the first African American to receive a PhD in chemistry from Iowa State University .
Go to Profile#6941
Arthur Roderick Collar
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Arthur Roderick Collar CBE FRS FREng was an English scientist and engineer who made significant contributions in the areas of aeroelasticity, matrix theory and its applications in engineering dynamics.
Go to Profile#6942
Gopinath Kartha
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Gopinath Kartha was a prominent crystallographer of Indian origin. In 1967, he determined the molecular structure of the enzyme ribonuclease. This was the first protein structure elucidated and published in the United States.
Go to Profile#6943
Chi Che Wang
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
Chi Che Wang , also known as Wang Chi-Lian, was a Chinese biochemist and college professor. Wang was one of the first Chinese women to make a career in American higher education and scientific research.
Go to Profile#6944
Jakob Meisenheimer
1876 - 1934 (58 years)
Jakob Meisenheimer was a German chemist. He made numerous contributions to organic chemistry, the most famous being his proposed structure for a group of compounds now named Meisenheimer complex. He also proposed the mechanism of the Beckmann rearrangement. Later in his career, he reported the synthesis of the pyridine-N-oxide.
Go to Profile#6945
R. Norris Shreve
1885 - 1975 (90 years)
Randolph Norris Shreve was a chemical engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, educator and collector. After joining the Purdue University faculty in 1930, he helped to build the university's School of Chemical Engineering, the Purdue-Taiwan Engineering Project, and National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. He and his wife Eleanor are the namesakes of the Shreve Professorship of Organic Technology and Shreve Residence Hall at Purdue, and Shreve Hall on the Cheng Kung University campus. He is the namesake of the Norris Shreve Award for Outstanding Teaching in Chemical Engineering.
Go to Profile#6946
Richard H. Wilhelm
1909 - 1968 (59 years)
Richard Herman Wilhelm was an American chemical engineer notable for developing a new method of fluid separation called chemical parametric pumping. Wilhelm was also notable for pioneering in the development of fluid beds, which according to Princeton University "revolutionized the petroleum-cracking process". Princeton University established Wilhelm Lectures in his honor. Wilhelm was a member of the National Academy of Engineering Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a chairman of the department of chemical engineering at Princeton University. Princeton University cal...
Go to Profile#6947
Eduard Buchner
1860 - 1917 (57 years)
Eduard Buchner was a German chemist and zymologist, awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on fermentation. Biography Early years Buchner was born in Munich to a physician and Doctor Extraordinary of Forensic Medicine. His older brother was Hans Ernst August Buchner. In 1884, he began studies of chemistry with Adolf von Baeyer and of botany with Carl Nägeli, at the Botanic Institute in Munich. After a period working with Otto Fischer at the University of Erlangen, Buchner was awarded a doctorate from the University of Munich in 1888 under Theodor Curtius.
Go to Profile#6948
Petre Melikishvili
1850 - 1927 (77 years)
Petre Melikishvili was a Georgian chemist. He was the co-founder of Tbilisi State University , the first Rector of TSU, Head of the Department of Organic Chemistry , Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and Professor at the University of Odessa.
Go to Profile#6949
George E. Davis
1850 - 1907 (57 years)
George Edward Davis is regarded as the founding father of the discipline of chemical engineering. Life Davis was born at Eton on 27 July 1850, the eldest son of George Davis, a bookseller. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a local bookbinder but he abandoned this trade after two years to pursue his interest in chemistry. Davis studied at the Slough Mechanics Institute while working at the local gas works, and then spent a year studying at the Royal School of Mines in London before leaving to work in the chemical industry around Manchester, which at the time was the main centre of...
Go to Profile#6950
Arthur Michael
1853 - 1942 (89 years)
Arthur Michael was an American organic chemist who is best known for the Michael reaction. Life Arthur Michael was born into a wealthy family in Buffalo, New York in 1853, the son of John and Clara Michael, well-off real-estate investor. He was educated in that same city, learning chemistry both from a local teacher and in his own homebuilt laboratory. An illness thwarted Michael's plans to attend Harvard, and instead in 1871 he traveled to Europe with his parents and decided to study in Germany.
Go to Profile