The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#7051
Bertram Steele
1870 - 1934 (64 years)
Bertram Dillon Steele FRS was an Australian scientist, foundation professor of chemistry at the University of Queensland . Early life Steele was born in Plymouth, England, the son of Samuel Madden Steele, a surgeon, and his wife Hariette Sarah, née Acock. Steele was educated at the Plymouth Grammar School; he then began an apprenticeship with his father. Steele migrated to Australia in 1889, where he qualified as a pharmaceutical chemist at the Victorian College of Pharmacy where he won a gold medal in 1890. He then practised as a pharmacist.
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T. Stephen Crawford
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
Thomas Stephen Crawford was an American chemical engineer known for his research in coal, coal tar and coal gasification. He was a long-serving dean of the college of engineering at the University of Rhode Island, and namesake of Crawford Hall at the university.
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George Cecil Jaffe
1880 - 1965 (85 years)
George Cecil Jaffe , received his doctorate in chemistry in 1903 from the University of Leipzig, where he studied under Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald. He worked briefly at Cambridge and then the Curie Laboratory, where he worked with both J.J. Thomson and Pierre Curie. He eventually rose to full professor at the University of Giessen, however, with the rise of Nazism he was dismissed from his position. He eventually immigrated to the US and became a professor at Louisiana State University.
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Dalziel Hammick
1887 - 1966 (79 years)
Dalziel Llewellyn Hammick FRS was an English research chemist. His major work was in synthetic organic chemistry. Along with Walter Illingworth he promulgated the Hammick-Illingworth rule, which predicts the order of substitution in benzene derivatives. He also developed the Hammick reaction which generates ortho-substituted pyridines.
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Mary Louise Fossler
1868 - 1952 (84 years)
Mary Louise Fossler was an American chemist and chemistry professor. Fossler is best known for her contributions to chemistry research and for her career as a professor at the University of Nebraska. Fossler graduated from the University of Nebraska with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry in 1894, and then returned to complete a Master of Arts in chemistry.
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Frank Curry Mathers
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Frank Curry Mathers , was an American physical chemist and university professor. He was president of the Electrochemical Society. Early life and education Mathers, son of Elizabeth Bonsall and John Thomas Mathers, was born in a one-room log cabin in Monroe County, Indiana, four miles south of Bloomington. He graduated from Bloomington High School in 1899. Mathers received the A.B. degree in chemistry from Indiana University in 1903. He joined the I.U. faculty as instructor of chemistry, while also doing graduate work in electroplating with Oliver W. Brown for the M.A. degree in 1905. Mathers was granted a leave of absence to work toward his 1907 Ph.D.
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Charles Frederick Burgess
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Charles Frederick Burgess was an American chemist and engineer. He was founder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison department of Chemical Engineering in 1905, and was a pioneer in the development of electrochemical engineering in the United States. In 1917 he founded the Burgess Battery Company.
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Julia Southard Lee
1897 - Present (129 years)
Julia Southard Lee was an American textile chemist known for her teaching positions and research on protein fibers and textile quality. Early life and education Lee was born in Southard, Missouri on September 29, 1897. She attended the University of Missouri for her undergraduate education and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1926. She then attended Kansas State University and earned her master's degree in 1929. For her doctorate, she attended the University of Chicago and graduated in 1936. While at the University of Chicago, she received a fellowship in home economics named after Ellen Swallow Richards.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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Joseph Proust
1754 - 1826 (72 years)
Joseph Louis Proust was a French chemist. He was best known for his discovery of the law of definite proportions in 1794, stating that chemical compounds always combine in constant proportions. Life Joseph L. Proust was born on September 26, 1754, in Angers, France. His father served as an apothecary in Angers. Joseph studied chemistry in his father's shop and later went to Paris where he gained the appointment of apothecary in chief to the Salpêtrière. He also taught chemistry with Pilâtre de Rozier, a famous aeronaut.
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Vladimir Markovnikov
1838 - 1904 (66 years)
Vladimir Vasilyevich Markovnikov , also spelled as Markownikoff , was a Russian chemist., best known for having developed the Markovnikov's rule, that describes addition reactions of hydrogen halides and alkenes.
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Christopher Kelk Ingold
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Sir Christopher Kelk Ingold was a British chemist based in Leeds and London. His groundbreaking work in the 1920s and 1930s on reaction mechanisms and the electronic structure of organic compounds was responsible for the introduction into mainstream chemistry of concepts such as nucleophile, electrophile, inductive and resonance effects, and such descriptors as SN1, SN2, E1, and E2. He also was a co-author of the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules. Ingold is regarded as one of the chief pioneers of physical organic chemistry.
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Carl Schorlemmer
1834 - 1892 (58 years)
Carl Schorlemmer FRS was a German chemist who did research on hydrocarbons and contributed to the study of the history of chemistry. Early life and education Schorlemmer was born in 1834, the son of a joiner in Darmstadt. He was able to visit Realschule and later - against the will of his poor father- trade school. Schorlemmer started his training to become a pharmacist in 1853 in Groß-Umstadt. During his training he made own chemical experiments in the laboratory and was interested in astronomy and botany. After two and a half years he passed his exam, became an assistant pharmacist and worked in the Schwanen pharmacy in Heidelberg.
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Frédéric Joliot-Curie
1900 - 1958 (58 years)
Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie was a French physicist and husband of Irène Joliot-Curie, with whom he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of induced radioactivity. They were the second ever married couple, after his wife's parents, to win the Nobel Prize, adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. Joliot-Curie and his wife also founded the Orsay Faculty of Sciences, part of the Paris-Saclay University.
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Albert Ladenburg
1842 - 1911 (69 years)
Albert Ladenburg was a German chemist. Early life and education Ladenburg was a member of the well-known Jewish in Mannheim. He was educated at a Realgymnasium at Mannheim and then, after the age of 15, at the technical school of Karlsruhe, where he studied mathematics and modern languages. He then proceeded to the University of Heidelberg where he studied chemistry and physics with Robert Bunsen. He also studied physics in Berlin. He got his Ph.D. in Heidelberg.
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Charles Frédéric Gerhardt
1816 - 1856 (40 years)
Charles Frédéric Gerhardt was a French chemist, born in Alsace and active in Paris, Montpellier, and his native Strasbourg. Biography He was born in Strasbourg, which is where he attended the gymnasium . He then studied at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where Friedrich Walchner's lectures first stimulated his interest in chemistry. Next he attended the school of commerce in Leipzig, where he studied chemistry under Otto Linné Erdmann, who further developed his interest into a passion for questions of speculative chemistry.
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Hans Christian Ørsted
1777 - 1851 (74 years)
Hans Christian Ørsted was a Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, which was the first connection found between electricity and magnetism. Oersted's law and the oersted unit are named after him.
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Alexander Crum Brown
1838 - 1922 (84 years)
Alexander Crum Brown FRSE FRS was a Scottish organic chemist. Alexander Crum Brown Road in Edinburgh's King's Buildings complex is named after him. Early life and education Crum Brown was born at 4 Bellevue Terrace in Edinburgh. His mother, Margaret Fisher Crum , was the sister of the chemist Walter Crum, and his father, Rev Dr John Brown , was minister of Broughton Place Church in the east end of Edinburgh's New Town. His half brother was the physician and essayist John Brown.
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Nikolaus Riehl
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Nikolaus Riehl was a German nuclear physicist. He was head of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft. When the Russians entered Berlin near the end of World War II, he was invited to the Soviet Union, where he stayed for 10 years. For his work on the Soviet atomic bomb project, he was awarded a Stalin Prize, Lenin Prize, and Order of the Red Banner of Labor. When he was repatriated to Germany in 1955, he chose to go to West Germany, where he joined Heinz Maier-Leibnitz on his nuclear reactor staff at Technische Hochschule München ; Riehl made contributions to the nuclear facility Forschungsreaktor München .
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Johann Josef Loschmidt
1821 - 1895 (74 years)
Johann Josef Loschmidt , who mostly called himself Josef Loschmidt , was a notable Austrian scientist who performed ground-breaking work in chemistry, physics , and crystal forms. Born in Karlsbad, a town in the Austrian Empire , Loschmidt became professor of physical chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1868.
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Marcellin Berthelot
1827 - 1907 (80 years)
Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot was a French chemist and Republican politician noted for the ThomsenBerthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic substances, providing a large amount of counter-evidence to the theory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius that organic compounds required organisms in their synthesis. Berthelot was convinced that chemical synthesis would revolutionize the food industry by the year 2000, and that synthesized foods would replace farms and pastures. "Why not", he asked, "if it proved cheaper and better to make the same materials ...
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Johan Gadolin
1760 - 1852 (92 years)
Johan Gadolin was a Finnish chemist, physicist and mineralogist. Gadolin discovered a "new earth" containing the first rare-earth compound yttrium, which was later determined to be a chemical element. He is also considered the founder of Finnish chemistry research, as the second holder of the Chair of Chemistry at the Royal Academy of Turku . Gadolin was ennobled for his achievements and awarded the Order of Saint Vladimir and the Order of Saint Anna.
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William Odling
1829 - 1921 (92 years)
William Odling, FRS was an English chemist who contributed to the development of the periodic table. In the 1860s Odling, like many chemists, was working towards classifying the elements, an effort that would eventually lead to the periodic table of elements. He was intrigued by atomic weights and the periodic occurrence of chemical properties. William Odling and Lothar Meyer drew up tables similar, but with improvements on, Dmitri Mendeleev's original table. Odling drew up a table of elements using repeating units of seven elements, which bears a striking resemblance to Mendeleev's first table.
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Eilhard Mitscherlich
1794 - 1863 (69 years)
Eilhard Mitscherlich was a German chemist, who is perhaps best remembered today for his discovery of the phenomenon of crystallographic isomorphism in 1819. Early life and work Mitscherlich was born at Neuende in the Lordship of Jever, where his father was pastor. His uncle, Christoph Wilhelm Mitscherlich , professor at the University of Göttingen, was in his day a celebrated scholar. Eilhard Mitscherlich was educated at Jever by the historian Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, and in 1811 went to the University of Heidelberg devoting himself to philology, with an emphasis on the Persian language.
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Karl Friedrich Mohr
1806 - 1879 (73 years)
Karl Friedrich Mohr was a German chemist famous for his early statement of the principle of the conservation of energy. Ammonium iron sulfate, 2Fe2.6H2O, is named Mohr's salt after him. Life Mohr was born in 1806 into the family of a prosperous druggist in Koblenz. The young Mohr received much of his early education at home, a great part of it in his father's laboratory. This experience may be responsible for much of the skill Mohr later showed in devising instruments and methods of chemical analysis. At the age of twenty-one he began to study chemistry under Leopold Gmelin, and, after five y...
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Arthur Amos Noyes
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Arthur Amos Noyes was an American chemist, inventor and educator, born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, son of Amos and Anna Page Noyes, née Andrews. He received a PhD in 1890 from Leipzig University under the guidance of Wilhelm Ostwald.
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Hans von Euler-Chelpin
1873 - 1964 (91 years)
Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin was a German-born Swedish biochemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1929 with Arthur Harden for their investigations on the fermentation of sugar and enzymes. He was a professor of general and organic chemistry at Stockholm University and the director of its Institute for organic-chemical research . Euler-Chelpin was distantly related to Leonhard Euler. He married chemist Astrid Cleve, the daughter of the Uppsala chemist Per Teodor Cleve. In 1970, their son Ulf von Euler, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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Henry Louis Le Chatelier
1850 - 1936 (86 years)
Henry Louis Le Chatelier was a French chemist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He devised Le Chatelier's principle, used by chemists and chemical engineers to predict the effect a changing condition has on a system in chemical equilibrium.
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Lothar Meyer
1830 - 1895 (65 years)
Meyer was a distinguished German chemist who some historians feel deserves credit for the invention of the periodic table of the elements. He was born in Varel, a small town in the Duchy of Oldenburg, the son of a physician. After graduating from Gymnasium (secondary school) in Oldenburg, the young Lothar (he never used his first given name) studied medicine at the University of Zurich with Carl Ludwig and at the University of Würzburg with Rudolf Virchow. In 1854, Meyer transferred to the University of Heidelberg, where he studied chemistry with Robert Bunsen (of Bunsen burner fame). Intrig...
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Henry Edward Armstrong
1848 - 1937 (89 years)
Henry Edward Armstrong FRS FRSE was a British chemist. Although Armstrong was active in many areas of scientific research, such as the chemistry of naphthalene derivatives, he is remembered today largely for his ideas and work on the teaching of science. Armstrong's acid is named for him.
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Frederick G. Donnan
1870 - 1956 (86 years)
Frederick George Donnan CBE FRS FRSE was a British-Irish physical chemist who is known for his work on membrane equilibria, and commemorated in the Donnan equilibrium describing ionic transport in cells. He spent most of his career at University College London.
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Edward W. Morley
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
Edward Williams Morley was an American scientist known for his precise and accurate measurement of the atomic weight of oxygen, and for the Michelson–Morley experiment. Biography Morley was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Anna Clarissa Treat and the Reverend Sardis Brewster Morley. Both parents were of early colonial ancestry and of purely British origin. He grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. During his childhood, he suffered much from ill health and was therefore educated by his father at home until the age of nineteen.
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Norman Haworth
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Sir Walter Norman Haworth FRS was a British chemist best known for his groundbreaking work on ascorbic acid while working at the University of Birmingham. He received the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations on carbohydrates and vitamin C". The prize was shared with Swiss chemist Paul Karrer for his work on other vitamins.
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Kurt Alder
1902 - 1958 (56 years)
Kurt Alder was a German chemist and Nobel laureate. Biography Alder was born in the industrial area of Königshütte, Silesia , where he received his early schooling. Alder left the area when Königshütte became part of Poland in 1922. He studied chemistry at the University of Berlin from 1922, and later at the University of Kiel where his PhD was awarded in 1926 for work supervised by Otto Paul Hermann Diels.
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Friedrich Bergius
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Friedrich Karl Rudolf Bergius was a German chemist known for the Bergius process for producing synthetic fuel from coal, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of contributions to the invention and development of chemical high-pressure methods. Having worked with IG Farben during World War II, his citizenship came into question following the war, causing him to ultimately flee to Argentina, where he acted as adviser to the Ministry of Industry.
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Eugen Baumann
1846 - 1896 (50 years)
Eugen Baumann was a German chemist. He was one of the first people to create polyvinyl chloride , and, together with Carl Schotten, he discovered the Schotten-Baumann reaction. Life Baumann was born in Cannstatt, which is now part of Stuttgart. After he attended a gymnasium in Stuttgart, he was educated in the pharmacy of his father. During his time in Stuttgart, he attended the lectures of Hermann von Fehling at the University of Stuttgart.
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Ludwig Gattermann
1860 - 1920 (60 years)
Ludwig Gattermann was a German chemist who contributed significantly to both organic and inorganic chemistry. Early life Ludwig Gatterman was born on 20 April 1860 in Goslar, an old mining town north of the Harz mountains. Two of his three siblings died at a young age.
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Alexander Frumkin
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Alexander Naumovich Frumkin was a Russian/Soviet electrochemist, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1932, founder of the Russian Journal of Electrochemistry Elektrokhimiya and receiver of the Hero of Socialist Labor award. The Russian Academy of Sciences' A.N. Frumkin Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry is named after him.
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Ernst David Bergmann
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Ernst David Bergmann was an Israeli nuclear scientist and chemist. He is often considered the father of the Israeli nuclear program. Biography Ernst David Bergmann was born in Germany, His father, Judah Bergmann, was a rabbi. He studied chemistry at the University of Berlin under Wilhelm Schlenk. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1927. Bergmann continued to work at the university and wrote the "Comprehensive Manual of Organic Chemistry" together with Schlenk. The two-volume manual was published in 1932 and 1939, respectively; however, because Bergmann was Jewish his name to be removed from the tit...
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Fritz Pregl
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Fritz Pregl , was a Slovenian-Austrian chemist and physician from a mixed Slovene-German-speaking background. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1923 for making important contributions to quantitative organic microanalysis, one of which was the improvement of the combustion train technique for elemental analysis.
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Hans Theodor Bucherer
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Hans Theodor Bucherer was a German chemist and gave name to several chemical reactions, for example the Bucherer carbazole synthesis, the Bucherer reaction, and the Bucherer–Bergs reaction Life Bucherer started studying chemistry at the University of Munich, University of Karlsruhe and later with Johannes Wislicenus at the University of Leipzig. After he received his Ph.D in 1893 he worked at BASF. He became professor at Technical University of Dresden in 1901 changed to the Technical University of Berlin in 1913 and became professor at the Technical University of Munich in 1926.
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Max Bodenstein
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Max Ernst August Bodenstein was a German physical chemist known for his work in chemical kinetics. He was first to postulate a chain reaction mechanism and that explosions are branched chain reactions, later applied to the atomic bomb.
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Paul Sabatier
1854 - 1941 (87 years)
Prof Paul Sabatier FRS HFRSE was a French chemist, born in Carcassonne. In 1912, Sabatier was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Victor Grignard. Sabatier was honoured for his work improving the hydrogenation of organic species in the presence of metals.
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Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig was a German chemist. He discovered the pinacol coupling reaction, mesitylene, diacetyl and biphenyl. Fittig studied the action of sodium on ketones and hydrocarbons. He discovered the Fittig reaction or Wurtz–Fittig reaction for the synthesis of alkylbenzenes, he proposed a diketone structure for benzoquinone and isolated phenanthrene from coal tar. He discovered and synthesized the first lactones and investigated structures of piperine, naphthalene, and fluorene.
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Auguste Laurent
1807 - 1853 (46 years)
Auguste Laurent was a French chemist who helped in the founding of organic chemistry with his discoveries of anthracene, phthalic acid, and carbolic acid. He devised a systematic nomenclature for organic chemistry based on structural grouping of atoms within molecules to determine how the molecules combine in organic reactions. He studied under Jean-Baptiste Dumas as a laboratory assistant and worked with Charles Frédéric Gerhardt. He died in Paris from tuberculosis.
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William Hyde Wollaston
1766 - 1828 (62 years)
William Hyde Wollaston was an English chemist and physicist who is famous for discovering the chemical elements palladium and rhodium. He also developed a way to process platinum ore into malleable ingots.
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Theodore William Richards
1868 - 1928 (60 years)
Theodore William Richards was the first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements."
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