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,
#7051
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.
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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.
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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.
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James Kendall
1889 - 1978 (89 years)
James Pickering Kendall FRS FRSE was a British chemist. Life Kendall was born in Chobham, Surrey to soldier William Henry Kendall of the Royal Horse Artillery, and his second wife Rebecca Pickering. He attended the local village school and then, from 1900, Farnham Grammar School. From 1907 to 1910, he studied at the University of Edinburgh graduating with both a BSc and MA. In 1912, with the support of a scholarship, he went to the Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry in Stockholm to work with Arrhenius on electrolytes.
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Earl Muetterties
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Earl Muetterties , was an American inorganic chemist born in Illinois, who is known for his experimental work with boranes, homogeneous catalysis, heterogeneous catalysis, fluxional processes in organometallic complexes and apicophilicity.
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Paul Harteck
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Paul Karl Maria Harteck was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of aiding the Nazis in their nuclear weapons program and he was incarcerated at Farm Hall, an English house fitted with covert electronic listening devices, for six months.
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Kathleen Lonsdale
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Dame Kathleen Lonsdale was an Irish crystallographer, pacifist, and prison reform activist. She proved, in 1929, that the benzene ring is flat by using X-ray diffraction methods to elucidate the structure of hexamethylbenzene. She was the first to use Fourier spectral methods while solving the structure of hexachlorobenzene in 1931. During her career she attained several firsts for female scientists, including being one of the first two women elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 , first female professor at University College London, first woman president of the International Union ...
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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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Neil Kensington Adam
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Neil Kensington Adam was a British chemist. Education Adam was born in Cambridge, the first of three children of James Adam , a Classics don, and his classicist wife Adela Marion . His sister Barbara was a noted sociologist and criminologist, while his brother Captain Arthur Innes Adam was killed in France on 16 September 1916. His maternal uncle was Sir Alfred Kensington, a judge in the Chief Court of the Punjab.
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Hobart Hurd Willard
1881 - 1974 (93 years)
Hobart Hurd Willard was an analytical chemist and inorganic chemist who spent most of his career at the University of Michigan. He was known for his teaching skill and his authorship of widely used textbooks. His research interests were wide-ranging and involved the characterization of perchloric acid and periodic acid salts.
Go to Profile#7061
Warren L. McCabe
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Warren Lee McCabe was an American Physical Chemist and is considered as one of the founding fathers of the profession of chemical engineering. He is widely known for the eponymous McCabe–Thiele method for analysis of distillation processes and his book, Unit Operations of Chemical Engineering, a major textbook.
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Edgar Steacie
1900 - 1962 (62 years)
Edgar William Richard Steacie was a Canadian physical chemist and president of the National Research Council of Canada from 1952 to 1962. Education Born in Montreal, Quebec, the only child of Richard Steacie and Alice Kate McWood, he studied a year at the Royal Military College of Canada. In 1923, he received his Bachelor of Science degree and his Ph.D. in 1926 from McGill University.
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Stanley Rossiter Benedict
1884 - 1936 (52 years)
Stanley Rossiter Benedict was an American chemist best known for discovering Benedict's reagent, a solution that detects certain sugars. Personal life Stanley Rossiter Benedict was born on March 17, 1884, to a big family of six children in Cincinnati. His father, Wayland Richardson Benedict was a professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. His mother, Anne Kendrick Benedict, was a writer and a teacher and his maternal grandmother, a Professor of Greek, Latin and Sanskrit at the University of Rochester and was an editor of the King James Version of the Bible.
Go to Profile#7064
Ian Heilbron
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Sir Ian Heilbron DSO FRS was a Scottish chemist, who pioneered organic chemistry developed for therapeutic and industrial use. Early life and education Isidor Morris Heilbron was born in Glasgow on 6 November 1886 to a wine merchant and his wife . He was Jewish.
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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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Vladimir Ipatieff
1867 - 1952 (85 years)
Vladimir Nikolayevich Ipatieff ; was a Russian and American chemist. His most important contributions are in the field of petroleum chemistry and catalysts. Life and career Born in Moscow, Ipatieff first studied artillery in the Mikhailovskaya Artillery Academy in Petersburg, then later studied chemistry in Russia with Alexei Yevgrafovich Favorskii and in Germany. The prominence of his extended family is illustrated by the fact that the July 17, 1918, extermination of Czar Nicholas Romanoff, the Empress and the rest of the royal family took place in the basement of a vacation house owned by the Ipatieff family in Ekaterinburg.
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Frederick Soddy
1877 - 1956 (79 years)
Frederick Soddy FRS was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements. In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes". Soddy was a polymath who mastered chemistry, nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, finance and economics.
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John Masson Gulland
1898 - 1947 (49 years)
John Masson Gulland was a Scottish chemist and biochemist. His main work was on nucleic acids, morphine and aporphine alkaloids. His work at University College Nottingham on electrometric titration was important in leading to the discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick, and he was described as "a great nucleic acid chemist." He established the Scottish Seaweed Research Association and the Lace Research Council.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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Calvin Adam Buehler
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Calvin Adam Buehler was an American organic chemist and professor at the University of Tennessee from 1922 to 1965. He served as the Chemistry Department Head from 1940-1962, during which time he established the first chemistry doctoral program at the University of Tennessee. The chemistry building at the University of Tennessee is named Buehler Hall in his honor.
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Peter Joseph Moloney
1891 - 1989 (98 years)
Peter Joseph Moloney was a Canadian chemist. He is known for his work on developing vaccines against diphtheria and tetanus, purifying insulin preparations for clinical use, demonstrating antibodies against insulin in humans and animals, and developing sulfated insulin preparationss for the treatment of diabetics with insulin resistance. He also invented a quick-acting pH electrode and helped to develop an antiserum that was used in WW II for protection against gas gangrene.
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Victor Goldschmidt
1888 - 1947 (59 years)
Victor Moritz Goldschmidt was a Norwegian mineralogist considered to be the founder of modern geochemistry and crystal chemistry, developer of the Goldschmidt Classification of elements. Early life and education Goldschmidt was born in Zürich, Switzerland on 27 January 1888. His father, Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt, was a physical chemist at the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum and his mother, Amelie Koehne , was the daughter of a lumber merchant. They named him Viktor after a colleague of Heinrich, Victor Meyer. His father's family was Jewish back to at least 1600 and mostly highly educated, with rabbis, judges, lawyers and military officers among their numbers.
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Rutherford John Gettens
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Rutherford John Gettens was a chemist and pioneering conservation scientist. Born to Daniel and Clara Gettens, Rutherford John Gettens grew up in Mooers, New York, where he became valedictorian of his high school class in 1918. He received his B.S. from Middlebury College in 1923. On graduating, he taught chemistry at Colby College, Maine, before receiving his M.A. from Harvard University in 1929.
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Maurice Brodie
1903 - 1939 (36 years)
Maurice Brodie was a British-born American virologist who developed a polio vaccine in 1935. Early years and education Brodie was born in Liverpool, England, the son of Samuel Broude and Esther Ginsburg. The family immigrated to Ottawa, Canada, in 1910. Maurice graduated from Lisgar Collegiate Institute and McGill University Faculty of Medicine, Alpha Omega Alpha, in 1928; he was named a Wood Gold Medalist. He served as a medical intern, and in 1931 he received a Master of Science degree in physiology from McGill. Brodie belonged to the McGill chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu, and had been a staff reporter of the Ottawa Citizen, 1927–1928.
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Thomas Stevens Stevens
1900 - 2000 (100 years)
Thomas Stevens Stevens FRS FRSE was a 20th Scottish organic chemist. He was affectionately known as T.S.S. or Tommy Stevens. Life He was born in Renfrew on 8 October 1900, the only son of John Stevens and his wife, Jane Irving. His father was a design engineer and Production Director of William Simons & Co. shipbuilders in Renfrew. He was home educated by his mother until 1908 then educated at Paisley Grammar School. In 1915 he moved to Glasgow Academy and completed his education there in 1917.
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Joseph W. Kennedy
1916 - 1957 (41 years)
Joseph William Kennedy was an American chemist who was a co-discoverer of plutonium, along with Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin McMillan and Arthur Wahl. During World War II he was head of the CM Division at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where he oversaw research onto the chemistry and metallurgy of uranium and plutonium. After the war, he was recruited as a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is credited with transforming a university primarily concerned with undergraduate teaching into one that also boasts strong graduate and research programs. He died of ca...
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Hermann Staudinger
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Hermann Staudinger was a German organic chemist who demonstrated the existence of macromolecules, which he characterized as polymers. For this work he received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is also known for his discovery of ketenes and of the Staudinger reaction. Staudinger, together with Leopold Ružička, also elucidated the molecular structures of pyrethrin I and II in the 1920s, enabling the development of pyrethroid insecticides in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Robert Robinson
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
Sir Robert Robinson was a British organic chemist and Nobel laureate recognised in 1947 for his research on plant dyestuffs and alkaloids. In 1947, he also received the Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm.
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Gustavs Vanags
1891 - 1965 (74 years)
Gustavs Vanags was a Soviet and Latvian organic chemist, full member of Latvian SSR Academy of Sciences. He was also one of the signers of the Memorandum of Latvian Central Council in 1944. Biography Gustavs Vanags was born in "Rungas" house of the Schnicken manor . He received primary education in the Mitau Classic Gymnasium, and in 1910 enrolled Riga Polytechnic Institute. During the First World War, he, among many, went in evacuation to the inner regions of Russian Empire; after returning from it in 1921, he completed his education in the new-founded University of Latvia and worked at the Faculty of Chemistry, raising to the position of the chair of the Department of organic chemistry.
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Steven Kistler
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Samuel Stephens Kistler was an American scientist and chemical engineer, best known as the inventor of aerogels, one of the lightest known solid materials. Biography Kistler, the son of a shopkeeper, was born in the small town of Cedarville in the far northeastern corner of California. The family moved to the larger Santa Rosa when Kistler was 12, where he first became interested in chemistry. When he entered the College of the Pacific in 1917, however, his plan was to learn to play the cello, then pursue a degree in agriculture. Instead, he ended up taking every science course available, and after three years he moved to Stanford University and obtained a B.A.
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John Llewellyn
1915 - 1988 (73 years)
Sir Frederick John Llewellyn KCMG was an English chemist and academic administrator who spent some of his career in New Zealand. Biography Llewellyn was born in 1915. His father was Ernest Barrett Llewellyn. He received his education at Dursley Grammar School. He attended the University of Birmingham, from where he graduated with a BSc . At the same university, he received a PhD and a DSc.
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Mowbray Ritchie
1905 - 1966 (61 years)
Mowbray Ritchie FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish chemist and scientific author. He was a friend and colleague of Sir Edmund Hirst. Life Ritchie was born in Peebles on 5 October 1905, and was educated at Peebles High School. He studied chemistry at the University of Edinburgh graduating with a BSc in 1927. He then continued as a postgraduate gaining two doctorates . In 1932 Ritchie began working as a demonstrator at University chemistry lectures, and was promoted to lecturer in 1935.
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Edward Bartow
1870 - 1958 (88 years)
Edward Bartow was an American chemist and an expert in the field of sanitary chemistry. His career extended from 1897 to 1958 and he is best known for his work in drinking water purification and wastewater treatment. He was well known as an educator, and his many students went on to leadership positions in the fields of sanitary chemistry and engineering.
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Chika Kuroda
1884 - 1968 (84 years)
Chika Kuroda was a Japanese chemist whose research focused on natural pigments. She was the first woman in Japan to receive a Bachelor of Science. Biography Chika Kuroda was born in Saga, Kyushu on 24 March 1884, the third daughter of her father Kuroda Heihachi and her mother Toku.
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Lotte Loewe
1900 - Present (126 years)
Lotte Luise Friederike Loewe was a German chemist known for her published research in organic chemistry. Loewe was born in Breslau to Helene Loewe. She received her doctorate in chemistry from the University of Breslau in 1927 and began her career there shortly thereafter, spending six years as a chemistry assistant from 1927 to 1933. She then moved to the University of Zurich in Switzerland for one year and then the University of Istanbul in Turkey for 21 years, from 1934 to 1955. Her last academic appointment was at the University of Basel, Switzerland, where she spent six years from 19...
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Emma P. Carr
1880 - 1972 (92 years)
Emma Perry Carr was an American spectroscopist and chemical educator. Her work on unsaturated hydrocarbons and absorption spectra earned her the inaugural Francis P. Garvan Medal from the American Chemical Society in 1937.
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Heinrich Otto Wieland
1877 - 1957 (80 years)
Heinrich Otto Wieland was a German chemist. He won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into the bile acids. Career In 1901 Wieland received his doctorate at the University of Munich while studying under Johannes Thiele. In 1904 he completed his habilitation, then continued to teach at the university and starting in 1907 was a consultant for Boehringer Ingelheim. In 1914 he became associate professor for special topics in organic chemistry, and director of the Organic Division of the State Laboratory in Munich. From 1917 to 1918 Wieland worked in the service of the Kaiser Wilhe...
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George S. Whitby
1887 - 1972 (85 years)
George Stafford Whitby was the head of the University of Akron rubber laboratory and for many years was the only person in the United States who taught rubber chemistry. Whitby received the Charles Goodyear Medal in 1954 and in 1972, he was inducted into the International Rubber Science Hall of Fame. In 1986 the Rubber Division established the George Stafford Whitby Award in his honor.
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Katharine Blunt
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Katharine Blunt was an American chemist, professor, and nutritionist who specialized in the fields of home economics, food chemistry and nutrition. Most of her research was on nutrition, but she also made great improvements to research on calcium and phosphorus metabolism and on the basal metabolism of women and children. She served as the third president of Connecticut College.
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