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,
#7101
Gustaf Erik Pasch
1788 - 1862 (74 years)
Gustaf Erik Pasch was a Swedish inventor and professor of chemistry at Karolinska institute in Stockholm and inventor of the safety match. He was born in Norrköping, the son of a carpenter. He enrolled at Uppsala University in 1806 and graduated with a master's degree in 1821. Pasch is mostly known for the safety match, but he was also involved with making waterproof concrete for the Göta Canal, manufacture of bank notes and growing of silk worms. He married Augusta Fredrika Vilhelmina Berg in 1827.
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Josef Maria Eder
1855 - 1944 (89 years)
Josef Maria Eder was an Austrian chemist who specialized in the chemistry of photography, and who wrote a comprehensive early history of the technical development of chemical photography. Life and work Eder was born in Krems an der Donau in 1855. He studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology and at the University of Vienna. In 1876, he received his PhD and in 1879, after his habilitation, became lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology.
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Homer Burton Adkins
1892 - 1949 (57 years)
Homer Burton Adkins was an American chemist who studied the hydrogenation of organic compounds. Adkins was regarded as top in his field and a world authority on the hydrogenation of organic compounds. Adkins is known for his wartime work, where he experimented with chemical agents and poisonous gasses. Renowned for his work, Adkins eventually suffered a series of heart attacks and died in 1949.
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Julius Tafel
1862 - 1918 (56 years)
Julius Tafel was a Swiss chemist and electrochemist. Work He worked first with Hermann Emil Fischer on the field of organic chemistry, but changed to electrochemistry after his work with Wilhelm Ostwald. He is known for the discovery of an electrosynthetic rearrangement reaction of various alkylated ethyl acetoacetates to form hydrocarbons, now called the Tafel rearrangement, and the Tafel equation, which relates the rate of an electrochemical reaction to the overpotential. He is also credited for the discovery of the catalytic mechanism of hydrogen evolution . Tafel retired aged 48 due to il...
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Valery Legasov
1936 - 1988 (52 years)
Valery Alekseyevich Legasov was a Soviet inorganic chemist and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He is primarily known for his efforts to contain the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Legasov also presented the findings of an investigation to the International Atomic Energy Agency at the United Nations Office at Vienna, detailing the actions and circumstances that led to the explosion of Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
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Alexander Nesmeyanov
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Nesmeyanov was a Soviet chemist and academician specializing in organometallic chemistry. Biography He was born in Moscow. He had two brothers Vasily and Andrei and a sister Tatyana . His father , graduated with excellence Vladimir Gymnasium, and then the Faculty of Law of Moscow University. He became interested in enlightenment and was working as a public teacher in the village of Bushov for 10 years. He had married in 1898 and worked at the Moscow city government, then he was a director Bakhrushinsky orphanage in Moscow . Alexander's mother, Lyudmila Danilovna , was a multi-talented teacher.
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Anton Eduard van Arkel
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Anton Eduard van Arkel, was a Dutch chemist. Van Arkel suggested the names "pnictogen" and "pnictide" to refer to chemical elements in group 15 of the periodic table. Van Arkel, together with Jan Hendrik de Boer, developed a method for the preparation of very pure tungsten: the dissociation of the vapor of tungsten chloride on an incandescent core wire known as the Van Arkel–de Boer process. This method was later used by himself and others for many other metals and non-metals. Van Arkel and de Boer thus provided the first method to fabricate pure titanium.
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Carl Gustaf Mosander
1797 - 1858 (61 years)
Carl Gustaf Mosander was a Swedish chemist. He discovered the rare earth elements lanthanum, erbium and terbium. Early life and education Born in Kalmar, Mosander attended school there until he moved to Stockholm with his mother in 1809. In Stockholm, he became an apprentice at the Ugglan pharmacy. He took his pharmacy examination in 1817, but had an interest in medicine and joined the Karolinska Institute in 1820. He passed his medical examination in 1825. He worked in the laboratory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius and became a close friend of fellow student Friedrich Wöhler.
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Friedrich Fichter
1869 - 1952 (83 years)
Friedrich Fichter was a professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Basel. His main field of interest was electrochemistry. He initiated the founding of the scientific journal Helvetica Chimica Acta.
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William Allen Miller
1817 - 1870 (53 years)
William Allen Miller FRS was a British scientist. Life Miller was born in Ipswich, Suffolk and educated at Ackworth School and King's College London. He was related to William Allen and first cousin to the leading suffragist Anne Knight.
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James Flack Norris
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
James Flack Norris was an American chemist. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a Methodist minister, Norris was educated in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., before studying at Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated with an A.B. in chemistry. After graduating in 1892, he remained at the university to work as a fellow until 1895, when he was awarded his Ph.D. and became an academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He left MIT in 1904 to become the first professor of chemistry at the newly formed Simmons College, before returning to take up the position of professor of organic ch...
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Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner
1780 - 1849 (69 years)
Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner was a German chemist who is known best for work that was suggestive of the periodic law for the chemical elements, and for inventing the first lighter, which was known as the Döbereiner's lamp. He became a professor of chemistry and pharmacy for the University of Jena.
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Carl Gräbe
1841 - 1927 (86 years)
#7114
Thomas Charles Hope
1766 - 1844 (78 years)
Thomas Charles Hope was a Scottish physician, chemist and lecturer. He proved the existence of the element strontium, and gave his name to Hope's Experiment, which shows that water reaches its maximum density at .
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Theodor Zincke
1843 - 1928 (85 years)
Ernst Carl Theodor Zincke was a German chemist and the academic adviser of Otto Hahn. Life Theodor Zincke was born in Uelzen on 19 May 1843. He became a pharmacist and graduated in Göttingen with his Staatsexamen. He began studying chemistry with Friedrich Wöhler and received his Ph.D in 1869. He joined the group of August Kekulé at the University of Bonn, and in 1875 became professor at the University of Marburg where he remained until his retirement in 1913. He developed Zincke reaction, Zincke–Suhl reaction in 1906 and in 1900 Zincke nitration. Theodor Zincke died on 17 March 1928 in Marb...
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Philippe A. Guye
1862 - 1922 (60 years)
Philippe A. Guye FRS was a Swiss chemist who was awarded the Davy Medal in 1921 "for his researches in physical chemistry". Guye earned his Ph.D. at the University of Geneva, with research under the direction of Carl Gräbe. In 1892, Guye was elected to the “Chaire extraordinaire de chimie théorique et technique."
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St. Elmo Brady
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Saint Elmo Brady was an American chemist who was the first African American to obtain a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States. He received his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1916. Early life and education Saint Elmo Brady was born on December 22, 1884, in Louisville, Kentucky. Greatly influenced by Thomas W. Talley, a pioneer in the teaching of science, Brady received his bachelor's degree from Fisk University in 1908 at the age of 24, and immediately began teaching at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Brady also had a close relationship with and was mentored by Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.
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Icilio Guareschi
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Icilio Guareschi was an Italian chemist. Icilio Guareschi studied at the University of Bologna and received his Ph.D there in 1871. He became professor at the University of Siena and in 1879 at the University of Turin, where he worked until his death in 1918.
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Nikolay Beketov
1827 - 1911 (84 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Beketov was a Russian Imperial physical chemist and metallurgist. He was the father of a well-known Russian architect Alexei Beketov. Life and work In 1849, Beketov graduated from Kazan University and worked with Nikolay Zinin. In 1855, he became a junior scientific assistant in the Department of Chemistry at Kharkov University. In 1859–1887, Beketov was a professor at the same university. In 1865, he defended his PhD thesis on "Research into the phenomenon of displacement of one element by another" . In 1886, Beketov moved to Saint Petersburg, where he worked at the academic chemical laboratory and taught at the University for Women.
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Bernhard Tollens
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
Bernhard Christian Gottfried Tollens was a German chemist. Life and work Tollens attended school at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg where he was influenced by his science teacher, Karl Möbius. After graduating in 1857, Tollens started an apprenticeship in pharmacy. He finished in 1862 and began studying chemistry in Göttingen in Wöhler's laboratory, then supervised by Friedrich Konrad Beilstein and Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig. In 1864, Tollens submitted his thesis and received his Ph.D. without a defense. The latter was possible through the intercession of Wöhler so that Tollens could accept and begin an attractive job at a bronze factory.
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Ivan Stranski
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Ivan Nikolov Stranski was a Bulgarian physical chemist who is considered the father of crystal growth research. He was the founder of the Bulgarian school of physical chemistry, heading the departments of physical chemistry at Sofia University and later at the Technical University of Berlin, of which he was also rector. The Stranski–Krastanov growth and Kossel–Stranski model are some of Stranski's contributions which bear his name.
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Joseph Henry Gilbert
1817 - 1901 (84 years)
Sir Joseph Henry Gilbert was an English chemist, noteworthy for his long career spent improving the methods of practical agriculture. Along with J.B. Lawes, he conducted experiments at Rothamstead for forty years. One of the key findings of Lawes and Gilbert was that cereal crops took up nitrogen from the soil, contrary to the ideas of Justus von Liebig who held that it was obtained only from the air. Their work made Rothamstead a leading centre of agricultural research. Gilbert became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1860.
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Julius Nieuwland
1878 - 1936 (58 years)
Julius Aloysius Arthur Nieuwland, CSC, was a Belgian-born Holy Cross priest and professor of chemistry and botany at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is known for his contributions to acetylene research and its use as the basis for one type of synthetic rubber, which eventually led to the invention of neoprene by DuPont.
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Rudolf Criegee
1902 - 1975 (73 years)
Rudolf Criegee was a German organic chemist. Early life Criegee's family was wealthy. His father worked as a court director. The family was national liberal, Prussian and Protestant, managing what Rudolf Criegee felt was a great fortune. His happy childhood was ended by the World War I. In March 1915, his eldest brother died on the Western Front, while a second brother was seriously injured in the summer of 1916. Criegee himself was drafted.
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Andrew Ure
1778 - 1857 (79 years)
Andrew Ure FRS was a Scottish physician, chemist, scriptural geologist, and early business theorist who founded the Garnet Hill Observatory. He was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society. Ure published a number of books based on his industrial consulting experiences.
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Ellen Swallow Richards
1842 - 1911 (69 years)
Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards was an American industrial and safety engineer, environmental chemist, and university faculty member in the United States during the 19th century. Her pioneering work in sanitary engineering, and experimental research in domestic science, laid a foundation for the new science of home economics. She was the founder of the home economics movement characterized by the application of science to the home, and the first to apply chemistry to the study of nutrition.
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Wolfgang Ostwald
1883 - 1943 (60 years)
Carl Wilhelm Wolfgang Ostwald was a German chemist and biologist researching colloids. Ostwald was born in Riga, the son of the 1909 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Wilhelm Ostwald, and died in Dresden.
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Max Joseph von Pettenkofer
1818 - 1901 (83 years)
Max Joseph Pettenkofer, ennobled in 1883 as Max Joseph von Pettenkofer was a Bavarian chemist and hygienist. He is known for his work in practical hygiene, as an apostle of good water, fresh air and proper sewage disposal. He was further known as an anti-contagionist, a school of thought, named later on, that did not believe in the then novel concept that bacteria were the main cause of disease. In particular he argued in favor of a variety of conditions collectively contributing to the incidence of disease including: personal state of health, the fermentation of environmental ground water, and also the germ in question.
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Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville
1818 - 1881 (63 years)
Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville was a French chemist. He was born in the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies, where his father was French consul. Together with his elder brother Charles, he was educated in Paris at the collège Rollin. In 1844, having graduated as a doctor of medicine and doctor of science, he was appointed to organize the new faculty of science at Besançon, where he acted as dean and professor of chemistry from 1845 to 1851. Returning to Paris in the latter year he succeeded Antoine Jérôme Balard at the École Normale, and in 1859 became professor at the Sorbonne in place of J.
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Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois
1821 - 1886 (65 years)
Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois was a French geologist and mineralogist who was the first to arrange the chemical elements in order of atomic weights, doing so in 1862. De Chancourtois only published his paper, but did not publish his actual graph with the irregular arrangement. Although his publication was significant, it was ignored by chemists as it was written in terms of geology. It was Dmitri Mendeleev's table published in 1869 that became most recognized. De Chancourtois was also a professor of mine surveying, and later geology at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris.
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Eduard Zintl
1898 - 1941 (43 years)
Eduard Zintl was a German chemist. He gained prominence for research on intermetallic compounds. Family background After his family moved from Weiden and Bayreuth to Munich and after he had finished school he was drafted for military service during World War I. At the age of 21 he started studying at the University of Munich with Otto Hönigschmid. He was an excellent student, and later became an assistant for Otto Hönigschmid, head of the German atomic weight laboratory.
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Constantin Istrati
1850 - 1919 (69 years)
Constantin I. Istrati was a Romanian chemist and physician. He was president of the Romanian Academy between 1913 and 1916. He was born in 1850 in Roman, Moldavia . He studied at the Academia Mihăileană in Iași, after which he went to Bucharest to study at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy, graduating in 1869, and obtaining his M.D. in 1877. After collaborating with Carol Davila, Istrati pursued his studies for three years at the University of Paris, where he obtained in 1885 a Ph.D. in Chemistry under the direction of Charles Adolphe Wurtz and Charles Friedel, with thesis On colored ...
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John William Draper
1811 - 1882 (71 years)
John William Draper was an English-born American scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer. He is credited with pioneering portrait photography and producing the first detailed photograph of the moon in 1840. He was also the first president of the American Chemical Society and a founder of the New York University School of Medicine.
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Herman Boerhaave
1668 - 1738 (70 years)
Herman Boerhaave was a Dutch botanist, chemist, Christian humanist, and physician of European fame. He is regarded as the founder of clinical teaching and of the modern academic hospital and is sometimes referred to as "the father of physiology," along with Venetian physician Santorio Santorio . Boerhaave introduced the quantitative approach into medicine, along with his pupil Albrecht von Haller and is best known for demonstrating the relation of symptoms to lesions. He was the first to isolate the chemical urea from urine. He was the first physician to put thermometer measurements to clinical practice.
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Paul Ulrich Villard
1860 - 1934 (74 years)
Paul Ulrich Villard was a French chemist and physicist. He discovered gamma rays in 1900 while studying the radiation emanating from radium. Early research Villard was born in Saint-Germain-au-Mont-d'Or, Rhône. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1881 and taught in several Lycées, ending with a Lycée in Montpellier. He would maintain a laboratory position at the Ecole Normale Supérieure until his retirement. At the time when he discovered what we now call gamma rays, Villard was working in the chemistry department of the École Normale Supérieure rue d'Ulm, Paris.
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Smithson Tennant
1761 - 1815 (54 years)
Smithson Tennant FRS was an English chemist. He is best known for his discovery of the elements iridium and osmium, which he found in the residues from the solution of platinum ores in 1803. He also contributed to the proof of the identity of diamond and charcoal. The mineral tennantite is named after him.
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Harvey Washington Wiley
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
Harvey Washington Wiley was an American chemist who advocated successfully for the passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and subsequently worked at the Good Housekeeping Institute laboratories. He was the first commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration.
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Sophus Mads Jørgensen
1837 - 1914 (77 years)
Sophus Mads Jørgensen was a Danish chemist. He is considered one of the founders of coordination chemistry, mainly by being one of the pioneers of the famous chain theory and is known for the debates which he had with Alfred Werner during 1893-1899. While Jørgensen's theories on coordination chemistry were ultimately proven to be incorrect, his experimental work provided much of the basis for Werner's theories. Jørgensen also made major contributions to the chemistry of platinum and rhodium compounds.
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Carl Jacob Löwig
1803 - 1890 (87 years)
Carl Jacob Löwig was a German chemist and discovered bromine independently of Antoine Jérôme Balard. He received his PhD at the University of Heidelberg for his work with Leopold Gmelin. During his research on mineral salts he discovered bromine in 1825, as a brown gas evolving after the salt was treated with chlorine.
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Raphael Meldola
1849 - 1915 (66 years)
Raphael Meldola FRS was a British chemist and entomologist. He was Professor of Organic Chemistry in the University of London, 1912–15. Life Born in Islington, London, he was descended from Raphael Meldola , a theologian who was acting minister of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in London, 1804. Meldola was the only son of Samuel Meldola; married Ella Frederica, daughter of Maurice Davis of London. He was educated in chemistry at the Royal College of Chemistry, London. There is a portrait of Meldola by Solomon J. Solomon in the Royal Society collection; also a photograph by Maull & Fox, vis...
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Walter Hieber
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Walter Hieber was an inorganic chemist, known as the father of metal carbonyl chemistry. He was born 18 December 1895 and died 29 November 1976. Hieber's father was Johannes Hieber, an influential evangelical minister and politician.
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Chaim Weizmann
1874 - 1952 (78 years)
Chaim Azriel Weizmann was a Russian-born biochemist, Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel. He was elected on 16 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952. Weizmann was fundamental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration and later convincing the United States government to recognize the newly formed State of Israel.
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Ernst Cohen
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Ernst Julius Cohen ForMemRS was a Dutch Jewish chemist known for his work on the allotropy of metals. Cohen studied chemistry under Svante Arrhenius in Stockholm, Henri Moissan at Paris, and Jacobus van't Hoff at Amsterdam. In 1893 he became Van't Hoff's assistant and in 1902 he became professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Utrecht, a position which he held until his retirement in 1939. Throughout his life, Cohen studied the allotropy of tin. Cohen's areas of research included polymorphism of both elements and compounds, photographic chemistry, electrochemistry, pizeochemistry, and the history of science.
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Louis Joseph Troost
1825 - 1911 (86 years)
Louis Joseph Troost was a French chemist. Biography In 1848, he began his studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where from 1851 he worked as an assistant chemist. In 1856, he received his doctorate of sciences. After serving as chair of chemistry at the Lycée Bonaparte, he became a lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure . Beginning in 1874, he was a professor of chemistry to the faculty of sciences in Paris, and in 1884, replaced Charles Adolphe Wurtz as a member of the Académie des sciences.
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Sophia Getzowa
1872 - 1946 (74 years)
Sophia Getzowa was a Belarusian-born pathologist and scientist in Mandatory Palestine. She grew up in a Jewish shtetl in Belarus and during her medical studies at the University of Bern, she became engaged to Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel. Together they worked in the Zionist movement. After a four-year romance, Weizmann broke off their engagement and Getzowa returned to her medical studies, graduating in 1904. She carried out widely cited research on the thyroid, identifying solid cell nests in 1907.
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Astrid Cleve
1875 - 1968 (93 years)
Astrid Maria Cleve von Euler was a Swedish botanist, geologist, chemist and researcher at Uppsala University. She was the first woman in Sweden to obtain a doctoral degree of science. Life Astrid Maria Cleve was born into academic life on 22 January 1875, in Uppsala, Sweden. She was the eldest daughter of the chemist, oceanographer, geologist and professor Per Teodor Cleve and author Carolina Alma "Caralma" Öhbom . Her younger sisters were Agnes Cleve-Jonand , a visual artist and pioneer of Modernism in Sweden and Célie Brunius , a journalist. They received their early education at home from ...
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Rudolf Signer
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Rudolf Signer contributed to the discovery of the DNA double helix. He was a Professor for organic chemistry at the University of Bern from 1935 until 1972. Education Signer was the son of Jakob Signer, a chemical scientist working in the textile industry, and his wife Dorothea Agnes Scherrer. Rudolf Signer went to high school in St. Gallen and matriculated at the ETH Zurich in 1921 to study chemistry, initially in order to become a teacher. 1927 he graduated with his doctorate under the supervision of Hermann Staudinger. Already 1926 he had become Wissenschaftlicher Assistent at the Univers...
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Karl Heinrich Ritthausen
1826 - 1912 (86 years)
Karl Heinrich Ritthausen was a German biochemist who identified two amino acids and made other contributions to the science of plant proteins. Education Ritthausen was born in Armenruh, near Goldburg, Silesia, Prussia, in today's Poland.
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Hugo Schiff
1834 - 1915 (81 years)
Hugo Schiff was an Italian naturalized chemist. The son of a Jewish businessman and brother of the physiologist Moritz Schiff, Hugo Schiff was German by nationality. He discovered Schiff bases and other imines, and was responsible for research into aldehydes; leading to his development of the Schiff test. He also worked in the field of amino acids and the Biuret reagent.
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Salimuzzaman Siddiqui
1897 - 1994 (97 years)
Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, was a Pakistani Muhajir organic chemist specialising in natural products, and a professor of chemistry at the University of Karachi. Siddiqui studied philosophy at Aligarh Muslim University and later studied chemistry at Frankfurt University, where he received his PhD in 1927. On return to British India, he worked at the Tibbia College Delhi and the Indian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. He later moved to Pakistan and worked in the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. He went on to establish the Pakistan National Science Council and was appointed its first chairman in 1961.
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