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,
#6951
Wilhelm Traube
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Wilhelm Traube was a German chemist. Biography Traube was born at Ratibor in Prussian Silesia, a son of the famous private scholar Moritz Traube. After studying law for a short time, he studied chemistry in Heidelberg, Breslau , Munich and Berlin. Among his tutors were August Wilhelm von Hofmann, Adolf von Baeyer and Karl Friedrich Rammelsberg. In 1888 he received his doctorate "Über die Additionsprodukte der Cyansäure". Since 1897 Traube was assistant at the Pharmakological Institute in Berlin, since 1902 assistant at the Pharmaceutical Institute and "Titularprofessor". In 1911 he became an associate professor and 1929 a full professor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Francisco Zaera
Francisco Zaera is a Venezuelan-American chemist, currently a distinguished professor at University of California, Riverside and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society and the American Vacuum Society.
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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.
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Pehr Victor Edman
1916 - 1977 (61 years)
Pehr Victor Edman was a Swedish biochemist. He developed a method for sequencing proteins; the Edman degradation. Early life Edman was born in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1935 he started studying medicine at Karolinska Institutet, where he became interested in basic research and received a bachelor in medicine in 1938. His research was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, where he was drafted to serve in the Swedish army. He returned to the Karolinska Institutet where he earned his doctoral degree under advice from Professor Erik Jorpes in 1946.
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Paul Flory
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Paul John Flory was an American chemist and Nobel laureate who was known for his work in the field of polymers, or macromolecules. He was a leading pioneer in understanding the behavior of polymers in solution, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1974 "for his fundamental achievements, both theoretical and experimental, in the physical chemistry of macromolecules".
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Henry Eyring
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Henry Eyring was a Mexico-born United States theoretical chemist whose primary contribution was in the study of chemical reaction rates and intermediates. Eyring developed the Absolute Rate Theory or Transition state theory of chemical reactions, connecting the fields of chemistry and physics through atomic theory, quantum theory, and statistical mechanics.
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Irving Langmuir
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Irving Langmuir was an American chemist, physicist, and engineer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his work in surface chemistry. Langmuir's most famous publication is the 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure". Langmuir became embroiled in a priority dispute with Lewis over this work; Langmuir's presentation skills were largely responsible for the popularization of the theory, although the credit for the theory itself belongs mostly to Lewis.
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Robert S. Mulliken
1896 - 1986 (90 years)
Robert Sanderson Mulliken was an American physicist and chemist, primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory, i.e. the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules. Mulliken received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1966 and the Priestley Medal in 1983.
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Louis Fieser
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Louis Frederick Fieser was an American organic chemist, professor, and in 1968, professor emeritus at Harvard University. He invented militarily effective napalm while at Harvard in 1942. His award-winning research included work on blood-clotting agents including the first synthesis of vitamin K, synthesis and screening of quinones as antimalarial drugs, work with steroids leading to the synthesis of cortisone, and study of the nature of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
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J. D. Bernal
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
John Desmond Bernal was an Irish scientist who pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography in molecular biology. He published extensively on the history of science. In addition, Bernal wrote popular books on science and society. He was a communist activist and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain .
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Raymond Fuoss
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Raymond Matthew Fuoss was an American chemist who researched mainly on electrolytes, polyelectrolytes, and polymers. He held Sterling Professor status at Yale University. Early life and education Fuoss was born to Jacob Z. Fuoss in 1905 and graduated from Altoona High School.
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Joel Henry Hildebrand
1881 - 1983 (102 years)
Joel Henry Hildebrand was an American educator and a pioneer chemist. He was a major figure in physical chemistry research specializing in liquids and nonelectrolyte solutions. Education and professorship He was born in Camden, New Jersey on November 16, 1881.
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Stephen Brunauer
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Stephen Brunauer was an American research chemist, government scientist, and university teacher. He resigned from his position with the U.S. Navy during the McCarthy era, when he found it impossible to refute anonymous charges that he was disloyal to the U.S.
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Takeru Higuchi
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Takeru Higuchi was an American chemist who was widely known as "the father of physical pharmacy". He invented the time-release medication capsule, which would release medicine slowly into the bloodstream.
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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.
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Peter Debye
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Peter Joseph William Debye was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. Biography Early life Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, Debye enrolled in the Aachen University of Technology in 1901. In 1905, he completed his first degree in electrical engineering. He published his first paper, a mathematically elegant solution of a problem involving eddy currents, in 1907. At Aachen, he studied under the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who later claimed that his most important discovery was Peter Debye.
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George C. Pimentel
1922 - 1989 (67 years)
George Claude Pimentel was a preeminent chemist and researcher. He was also dedicated to science education and public service. the inventor of the chemical laser. He developed the technique of matrix isolation in low-temperature chemistry. He also developed time-resolved infrared spectroscopy to study radicals and other transient species. In the late 1960s, Pimentel led the University of California team that designed the infrared spectrometer for the Mars Mariner 6 and 7 missions that analyzed the surface and atmosphere of Mars.
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Frederick Rossini
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Frederick Dominic Rossini was an American thermodynamicist noted for his work in chemical thermodynamics. In 1920, at the age of twenty-one, Rossini entered Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and soon was awarded a full-time teaching scholarship. He graduated with a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1925, followed by an M.S. degree in science in physical chemistry in 1926.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Evert Verwey
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Evert Johannes Willem Verwey, also Verweij, was a Dutch chemist, who also did research in physical chemistry. Verwey studied chemistry at the University of Amsterdam and obtained his MSc in 1929. From 1931 he worked as an assistant at the University of Groningen, where he obtained his PhD under the guidance of Hugo Rudolph Kruyt . In 1934 he moved to the Philips Laboratories in Eindhoven. He continued work on colloids, which was also the topic of his dissertation, and on oxides. The Verwey transition in magnetite is named after him.
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Raymond Thayer Birge
1887 - 1980 (93 years)
Raymond Thayer Birge was an American physicist. Career Born in Brooklyn, New York, into an academic scientific family, Birge obtained his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1913. In the same year he married Irene A. Walsh. The Birges had two children, Carolyn Elizabeth and Robert Walsh, Associate Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1973-1981. After five years as an instructor at Syracuse University, he became a member of the physics department at University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until he retired, as chairman, in 1955.
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Victor Gold
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Victor Gold FRS FRSC was a chemist who served on the faculty of King's College, London. Gold was born in Vienna, the son of lawyer Oscar Gold and his first wife, the former Emmy Kopperl. He was raised primarily by his mother. Gold arrived in England, at Croydon aerodrome, in the spring of 1938, aged 15. His entry to the UK had been arranged by his uncle Max Gold . He was sent, with a cousin, to Loughborough College to learn English and work in the engineering workshops .
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Leon Lapidus
1924 - 1977 (53 years)
Leon Lapidus was an American chemist and chemical engineer, the chairman of the department of chemical engineering at Princeton University, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an author of over a 100 technical publications.
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Abel Wolman
1892 - 1989 (97 years)
Abel Wolman was an American engineer, educator and pioneer of modern sanitary engineering. His professional career left impacts in academia, sanitary engineering research, environmental and public health services, engineering professional societies, and journal publications. Wolman is best known for his research with Linn Enslow in the chlorination of Baltimore's municipal water supply, which has contributed to the distribution of safe municipal water supplies globally.
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Eugen Glueckauf
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Eugen Glueckauf FRS was a German-born British expert on nuclear power. Biography Eugen Glückauf was born on 9 April 1906 in Eisenach, Germany, the son of Bruno Glückauf, a clothier, and Elsa Pretzfelder.
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Robert Garrels
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Robert Minard Garrels was an American geochemist. Garrels applied experimental physical chemistry data and techniques to geology and geochemistry problems. The book Solutions, Minerals, and Equilibria co-authored in 1965 by Garrels and Charles L. Christ revolutionized aqueous geochemistry.
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Ulrich Hofmann
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Ulrich Hofmann was a German chemist known for his study of clay minerals and the pioneering use of electron microscopes in the study of carbonaceous materials. Education and career Hofmann was born in Munich in 1903 and the son of the German chemist Karl Andreas Hofmann. He studied chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin and obtained a diploma in 1925. He went on to receive his doctorate in 1926 from his father with the work Glanzkohlenstoff und die Reihe des schwarzen kristallinen Kohlenstoffs . In 1931 he received habilitation on graphite oxide and then worked as a lecturer at the T...
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Charles D. Coryell
1912 - 1971 (59 years)
Charles DuBois Coryell was an American chemist who was one of the discoverers of the element promethium. Coryell earned a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1935 as the student of Arthur A. Noyes. During the late 1930s he engaged in research on the structure of hemoglobin in association with Linus Pauling. He also taught at UCLA before 1942. In 1942 he accepted a job with the Manhattan Project, for which he was Chief of the Fission Products Section, both at the University of Chicago and at Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee . His group had responsibility for character...
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Francis William Aston
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Francis William Aston FRS was a British chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes in many non-radioactive elements and for his enunciation of the whole number rule. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
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N. Howell Furman
1892 - 1965 (73 years)
Nathaniel Howell Furman was an American professor of analytical chemistry who helped develop the electrochemical uranium separation process as a member of the Manhattan Project. Background and career Furman was born in the Lawrenceville section of Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey in 1892. He attended Lawrenceville School, where he was a model student, graduating with a Master's Prize from his high school in 1909. He enrolled in Princeton University, where he received Phi Beta Kappa honors and graduated in 1913. He received an M.S. in 1915 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1917. Furman served in World War I in the Army Chemical Warfare Service.
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Samuel C. Lind
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
Samuel Colville Lind was a radiation chemist, referred to as "the father of modern radiation chemistry". He gained his B.A in 1899 at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. After a short spell at MIT he moved to study chemistry at Leipzig University in Germany, carrying out research into the kinetics of chemical reactions, where he was awarded a Ph.D in 1905. He then returned to work at the University of Michigan until 1913, studying the chemical reactions induced by ionizing radiation. From 1913 to 1925 he worked at the US Bureau of Mines, concerned with extraction of radium from carnotite ore.
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Robert Thomas Sanderson
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Robert Thomas Sanderson was an American inorganic chemist, more commonly known by the initials "R.T." found in his papers. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago for his research in boron chemistry. After working in Texaco's research lab, he became a professor and spent his career on the faculties of the University of Florida, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. He also created a company supplying safety posters and lab-related artwork of his own design, and published several books including Vacuum Manipulation of Volatile Compounds.
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Otto Hahn
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Otto Hahn was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered radioactive isotopes of radium, thorium, protactinium and uranium. He also discovered the phenomena of atomic recoil and nuclear isomerism, and pioneered rubidium–strontium dating. In 1938, Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, for which Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Nuclear fission was the basis for nuclear reactors and nuclear w...
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Rosalind Franklin
1920 - 1958 (38 years)
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA , RNA , viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, Franklin's contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognized during her life, for which Franklin has been variously referred to as the "wronged heroine", the "dark lady of DNA", the "forgotten heroine", a "feminist icon", and the "Sylvia Plath of molecular biology".
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Ludwig Audrieth
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Ludwig Frederick Audrieth was a chemist, educator, and United States Army officer. He is known for his work on non-aqueous solvents. Early life Audrieth was born on February 23, 1901, in Vienna, Austria. He was brought to the United States in 1902 and naturalized as a citizen in 1912.
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Ronald Sydney Nyholm
1917 - 1971 (54 years)
Sir Ronald Sydney Nyholm was an Australian chemist who was a leading figure in inorganic chemistry in the 1950s and 1960s. Education Born on 29 January 1917 as the fourth in a family of six children. Nyholm's father, Eric Edward Nyholm was a railway guard. Nyholm's paternal grandfather, Erik Nyholm was a coppersmith born in Nykarleby in the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, who migrated to Adelaide in 1873. Ronald Nyholm valued his Finnish roots and was particularly proud in his election in 1959 as Corresponding Member of the Finnish Chemical Society.
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Wallace Carothers
1896 - 1937 (41 years)
Wallace Hume Carothers was an American chemist, inventor, and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont, who was credited with the invention of nylon. Carothers was a group leader at the DuPont Experimental Station laboratory, near Wilmington, Delaware, where most polymer research was done. Carothers was an organic chemist who, in addition to first developing nylon, also helped lay the groundwork for neoprene. After receiving his Ph.D., he taught at several universities before he was hired by DuPont to work on fundamental research.
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Fritz Arndt
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Fritz Georg Arndt was a German chemist recognised for his contributions to synthetic methodology, who together with Bernd Eistert discovered the Arndt-Eistert synthesis. Life Fritz Arndt was born on 6 July 1885, in Hamburg but started his chemistry studies at the University of Geneva followed by the University of Bern and receiving his PhD from the University of Freiburg for his work with Ludwig Gattermann in 1908.
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Herman Francis Mark
1895 - 1992 (97 years)
Herman Francis Mark was an Austrian-American chemist regarded for his contributions to the development of polymer science. Mark's x-ray diffraction work on the molecular structure of fibers provided important evidence for the macromolecular theory of polymer structure. Together with Houwink he formulated an equation, now called the Mark–Houwink or Mark–Houwink–Sakurada equation, describing the dependence of the intrinsic viscosity of a polymer on its relative molecular mass . He was a long-time faculty at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. In 1946, he established the Journal of Polymer Scie...
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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...
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David A. Frank-Kamenetskii
1910 - 1970 (60 years)
David Albertovich Frank-Kamenetskii was a Soviet theoretical physicist and chemist, professor and doctor of physical, chemical and mathematical sciences. He developed the thermal explosion theory, worked on plasma physics problems and in astrophysics.
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Morris Sugden
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Sir Theodore Morris Sugden FRS, was a British chemist who specialised in combustion research. Biography Theodore Morris Sugden was born in the village of Triangle, the only child of Florence and Frederick Morris Sugden, a clerk in a mill. After attending Sowerby Bridge and District Secondary School he gained an open scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1938, where he read chemistry and was awarded a First in 1940. That year he began research under physicist W C Price on the measurement of precise ionization potentials of molecules. He later switched to working with R G W Norrish for ...
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Gregory P. Baxter
1876 - 1953 (77 years)
Gregory Paul Baxter was an American chemist notable for his work on atomic weights. Biography Born in Somerville, Massachusetts, Baxter became an instructor in chemistry at Harvard in 1897. Dr Baxter served as chairman of the Harvard Chemistry Department from 1911 to 1932. In 1925 he assumed the Theodore William Richards Professorship, which he held until his retirement in 1944.
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Hans Meerwein
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
Hans Meerwein was a German chemist. Several reactions and reagents bear his name, most notably the Meerwein–Ponndorf–Verley reduction, the Wagner–Meerwein rearrangement, the Meerwein arylation reaction, and Meerwein's salt.
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