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,
#7001
Eugen Bamberger
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Eugen Bamberger was a German chemist and discoverer of the Bamberger rearrangement. Life and achievements Bamberger started studying medicine in 1875 at the University of Berlin, but changed subjects and university after one year, starting his studies of science at the University of Heidelberg in 1876. He returned to Berlin in the same year and focused on chemistry. He received his PhD for work with August Wilhelm von Hofmann in Berlin and became assistant of Karl Friedrich August Rammelsberg at Charlottenburg and in 1883 of Adolf von Baeyer at the University of Munich, where, after his hab...
Go to Profile#7002
Albin Haller
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Albin Haller was a French chemist. Haller founded the École Nationale Supérieure des Industries Chimiques in Nancy and in 1917 won the Davy Medal of the Royal Society "On the ground of his important researches in the domain of organic chemistry". Appointed to the French Academy of Sciences in 1900, he served as its president beginning in 1923. He was also a member of the French Académie Nationale de Médecine.
Go to Profile#7003
Lev Chugaev
1873 - 1922 (49 years)
Lev Aleksandrovich Chugaev was a chemist from the Russian Empire. At the height of his career, he was professor of chemistry at the University of Petersburg, being the successor to Dmitri Mendeleev. He was active in the fields of inorganic chemistry, especially platinum group complexes, as well as organic chemistry. He is also known as Leo Aleksandrovich Tschugaeff or Tschugaev.
Go to Profile#7004
Adolf Windaus
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus was a German chemist who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1928 for his work on sterols and their relation to vitamins. He was the doctoral advisor of Adolf Butenandt who also won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1939.
Go to Profile#7005
Germain Henri Hess
1802 - 1850 (48 years)
Germain Henri Hess was a Swiss-Russian chemist and doctor who formulated Hess's law, an early principle of thermochemistry. Early life and education Hess was born on 7 August 1802 in Geneva, Switzerland. His father was an artist and in 1805 moved the family to Russia to work as a tutor to a rich family. His Swiss-born mother was a tutor as well and Hess had the benefit of learning German and French at home. In 1817, his family moved to Dorpat, Russian Empire , where he went to a private school for two years, and then to Dorpat Gymnasium, which he finished in 1822. In autumn of the same year Hess studied medicine at the University of Dorpat.
Go to Profile#7006
Edward Calvin Kendall
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Edward Calvin Kendall was an American chemist. In 1950, Kendall was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine along with Swiss chemist Tadeusz Reichstein and Mayo Clinic physician Philip S. Hench, for their work with the hormones of the adrenal gland. Kendall did not only focus on the adrenal glands, he was also responsible for the isolation of thyroxine, a hormone of the thyroid gland and worked with the team that crystallized glutathione and identified its chemical structure.
Go to Profile#7007
Morris Travers
1872 - 1961 (89 years)
Morris William Travers, FRS was an English chemist who worked with Sir William Ramsay in the discovery of xenon, neon and krypton. His work on several of the rare gases earned him the name Rare Gas Travers in scientific circles. He was the founding director of the Indian Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#7008
Ludwig Wolff
1857 - 1919 (62 years)
Ludwig Wolff , born in Neustadt in Palatinate, was a German chemist. He studied chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he received his Ph.D. from Rudolph Fittig in 1882. He became Professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Jena in 1891 and held this position till his death in 1919. In 1911 he published a new reaction now known as the Wolff-Kishner reduction. His name is also associated with the chemical reaction known as the Wolff rearrangement .
Go to Profile#7009
Thomas Graham
1805 - 1869 (64 years)
Thomas Graham was a Scottish chemist known for his pioneering work in dialysis and the diffusion of gases. He is regarded as one of the founders of colloid chemistry. Life Graham was born in Glasgow,Scotland and was educated at the High School of Glasgow. Graham's father was a successful textile manufacturer, and wanted his son to enter into the Church of Scotland. Instead, defying his father's wishes, Graham became a student at the University of Glasgow in 1819. There he developed a strong interest in chemistry, studying under Professor Thomas Thomson, who was impressed and influenced by the young man.
Go to Profile#7010
Siegmund Gabriel
1851 - 1924 (73 years)
Siegmund Gabriel was a German chemist. Scientific career Siegmund Gabriel began studying chemistry at the University of Berlin in 1871. He continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg in 1872 with Professor Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1874, he received his doctorate and then returned to Berlin. He began teaching as an assistant, initially in the inorganic chemistry department, before becoming an associate professor in 1886. Gabriel later turned to organic chemistry in his own research.
Go to Profile#7011
Peter Waage
1833 - 1900 (67 years)
Peter Waage was a Norwegian chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Kristiania. Along with his brother-in-law Cato Maximilian Guldberg, he co-discovered and developed the law of mass action between 1864 and 1879.
Go to Profile#7012
Moses Gomberg
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Moses Gomberg was a chemistry professor at the University of Michigan. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and served as president of the American Chemical Society.
Go to Profile#7013
Ludwig Knorr
1859 - 1921 (62 years)
Ludwig Knorr was a German chemist. Together with Carl Paal, he discovered the Paal–Knorr synthesis, and the Knorr quinoline synthesis and Knorr pyrrole synthesis are also named after him. The synthesis in 1883 of the analgesic drug antipyrine, now called phenazone, was a commercial success. Antipyrine was the first synthetic drug and the most widely used drug until it was replaced by Aspirin in the early 20th century.
Go to Profile#7014
Hermann Irving Schlesinger
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Hermann Irving Schlesinger was an American inorganic chemist, working in boron chemistry. He and Herbert C. Brown discovered sodium borohydride in 1940 and both were involved in the further development of borohydride chemistry.
Go to Profile#7015
Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner
1783 - 1857 (74 years)
Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner was a German chemist, natural scientist and a professor of physics and chemistry. Biography Kastner received his doctorate in 1805 under the guidance of Johann Göttling and began lecturing at the University of Jena. He moved on to become professor at the University of Halle in 1812. In 1818 he relocated to the University of Bonn, where he would mentor famous chemist Justus Liebig. He then moved on to the University of Erlangen in the summer of 1821, where he would remain for the rest of his professional life.
Go to Profile#7016
Walter Noddack
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Walter Noddack was a German chemist. He, Ida Tacke , and Otto Berg reported the discovery of element 43 and element 75 in 1925. Rhenium They named element 75 rhenium . Rhenium was the last element to be discovered having a stable isotope. The existence of a yet undiscovered element at this position in the periodic table had been predicted by Henry Moseley in 1914. In 1925 they reported that they detected the element in platinum ore and in the mineral columbite. They also found rhenium in gadolinite and molybdenite. In 1928 they were able to extract 1 g of the element by processing 660 kg of molybdenite.
Go to Profile#7017
William Cullen
1710 - 1790 (80 years)
William Cullen was a Scottish physician, chemist and agriculturalist, and professor at the Edinburgh Medical School. Cullen was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment: He was David Hume's physician, and was friends with Joseph Black, Henry Home, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith, among others.
Go to Profile#7018
Bernard Courtois
1777 - 1838 (61 years)
Bernard Courtois, also spelled Barnard Courtois, was a French chemist credited with first isolating iodine, making early photography possible. By 1811 the Napoleonic Wars had made the government-controlled saltpeter business taper off since there was by then a shortage of wood ashes with which potassium nitrate was made. As an alternative, the needed potassium nitrate was derived from seaweed that was abundant on the Normandy and Brittany shores. The seaweed also had another, yet undiscovered, important chemical. One day towards the end of 1811 while Courtois was isolating sodium and potassium compounds from seaweed ash, he discovered iodine after he added sulfuric acid to the seaweed ash.
Go to Profile#7019
Wilhelm Groth
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Wilhelm Groth was a German physical chemist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; his main activity was the development of centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. After the war, he was a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Hamburg. In 1950, he became director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Bonn. He was a principal in the 1956 shipment of three centrifuges for uranium enrichment to Brazil.
Go to Profile#7020
Carl Shipp Marvel
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Carl Shipp "Speed" Marvel was an American chemist who specialized in polymer chemistry. He made important contributions to U.S. synthetic rubber program during World War II, and later worked at developing polybenzimidazoles, temperature-resistant polymers that are used in the aerospace industry, in fire-fighting equipment, and as a replacement for asbestos. He has been described as "one of the world's outstanding organic chemists" and received numerous awards, including the 1956 Priestley Medal and the 1986 National Medal of Science, presented by President Ronald Reagan.
Go to Profile#7021
Victor Henri
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Victor Henri was a French-Russian physical chemist and physiologist. He was born in Marseilles as a son of Russian parents. He is known mainly as an early pioneer in enzyme kinetics. He published more than 500 papers in a variety of disciplines including biochemistry, physical chemistry, psychology, and physiology. Aleksey Krylov was his half-brother.
Go to Profile#7022
Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge
1794 - 1867 (73 years)
Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge was a German analytical chemist. Runge identified the mydriatic effects of belladonna extract, identified caffeine, and discovered the first coal tar dye . Early life Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge was born near Hamburg on 8 February 1794. From a young age, Runge conducted chemical experiments, serendipitously identifying the mydriatic effects of belladonna extract.
Go to Profile#7023
Max Bergmann
1886 - 1944 (58 years)
Max Bergmann was a Jewish-German biochemist. Together with Leonidas Zervas, the discoverer of the group, they were the first to use the carboxybenzyl protecting group for the synthesis of oligopeptides.
Go to Profile#7024
Per Teodor Cleve
1840 - 1905 (65 years)
Per Teodor Cleve was a Swedish chemist, biologist, mineralogist and oceanographer. He is best known for his discovery of the chemical elements holmium and thulium. Born in Stockholm in 1840, Cleve earned his BSc and PhD from Uppsala University in 1863 and 1868, respectively. After receiving his PhD, he became an assistant professor of chemistry at the university. He later became professor of general and agricultural chemistry. In 1874 he theorised that didymium was in fact two elements; this theory was confirmed in 1885 when Carl Auer von Welsbach discovered neodymium and praseodymium.
Go to Profile#7025
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.
Go to Profile#7026
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.
Go to Profile#7027
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...
Go to Profile#7028
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.
Go to Profile#7029
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.
Go to Profile#7030
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.
Go to Profile#7031
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.
Go to Profile#7032
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.
Go to Profile#7033
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.
Go to Profile#7034
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.
Go to Profile#7035
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.
Go to Profile#7036
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.
Go to Profile#7037
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.
Go to Profile#7038
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.
Go to Profile#7039
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.
Go to Profile#7040
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.
Go to Profile#7041
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...
Go to Profile#7042
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.
Go to Profile#7043
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.
Go to Profile#7044
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.
Go to Profile#7045
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.
Go to Profile#7046
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...
Go to Profile#7047
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".
Go to Profile#7048
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".
Go to Profile#7049
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.
Go to Profile#7050
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.
Go to Profile