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
Leon Marchlewski
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Leon Paweł Teodor Marchlewski was a Polish chemist and an Honorary Member of the Polish Chemical Society. He was one of the founders in the field of chlorophyll chemistry. The illustration on the right is of his diplomatic passport he used in 1927 to attend an international conference on chemistry in Paris.
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Rudolf Schmitt
1830 - 1898 (68 years)
Rudolf Schmitt was a German chemist who together with Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe discovered the Kolbe-Schmitt reaction. Biography Schmitt was born in the small village Wippershain in the Hesse-Kassel as the second of eight siblings as son of a preacher. He moved several times during his childhood and entered the Gymnasium as boarding pupil in Marburg. He received his Abitur in 1853 and entered the University of Marburg the same year. He started studying mathematics, theology and chemistry, but later concentrated on chemistry. After 8 Semesters he joined Hermann Fehling at the University of ...
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Georges Urbain
1872 - 1938 (66 years)
Georges Urbain was a French chemist, a professor of the Sorbonne, a member of the Institut de France, and director of the Institute of Chemistry in Paris. Much of his work focused on the rare earths, isolating and separating elements such as europium and gadolinium, and studying their spectra, their magnetic properties and their atomic masses. He discovered the element lutetium . He also studied the efflorescence of saline hydrates.
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Niels Bjerrum
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Niels Janniksen Bjerrum was a Danish chemist. Niels Bjerrum was the son of ophthalmologist Jannik Petersen Bjerrum, and started to study at the University of Copenhagen in 1897. He received his Master's degree in 1902 and his Doctor's degree in 1908, and did research in coordination complex chemistry under Sophus Mads Jørgensen. He became a docent in 1912, and in 1914 he became a professor of chemistry at the Royal Agricultural College in Copenhagen, as successor of Odin Tidemand Christensen. He stayed on this post until his retirement in 1949, and from 1939 to 1946 he was also the Director ...
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Eben Norton Horsford
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Eben Norton Horsford was an American scientist who taught agricultural chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard from 1847 to 1863. Later he was known for his reformulation of baking powder, his interest in Viking settlements in North America, and the monuments he built to Leif Erikson.
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Józef Boguski
1853 - 1933 (80 years)
Józef Jerzy Boguski was a Polish chemist and a professor at the Warsaw Polytechnic. Life Boguski had served as an assistant in St. Petersburg to the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. From 1895 Boguski was a professor at Warsaw's Wawelberg and Rotwand School, and from 1920 at the Warsaw Polytechnic.
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Richard Wolffenstein
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
Richard Wolffenstein was a German chemist. He discovered acetone peroxide in 1895 by reacting acetone with hydrogen peroxide. The Wolffenstein-Böters reaction, which he discovered in 1913, was an alternative production method for explosives.
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Charles Prévost
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Charles Prévost was a French chemist. He was born on 20 March 1899 at Champlitte, Haute-Saône and died in 1983. Biography Prévost was the son of Georges Prévost and Marie Zimmermann . He married Eléonore Fumée , with whom he had two children. After studying at Lycée Louis-le-Grand he was a student from 1919 to 1923 at the École Normale Supérieure and at the University of Paris. In 1923 he entered the agrégation in physical sciences and spent six years as an assistant at the École Navale. In 1928 he received his doctorate in physical sciences. From 1929 to 1933 he was a lecturer in Nancy, then becoming a professor of chemistry; from 1936 to 1937 he was a professor at Lille.
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Ladislaus Farkas
1904 - 1948 (44 years)
Ladislaus Farkas is an Israeli chemist, of Austro-Hungarian origin, was the founder of the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Education and career Farkas was born in Dunajská Streda, Slovakia as the son of a pharmacist. In 1908, the family moved to Nagyvárad in Transylvania , where his father ran a pharmacy. The family attends a synagogue affiliated with Neolog Judaism. Farkas studied at the Gymnasium in Oradea, then spent two years at the Technical University of Vienna. He continued his studies in Berlin where he entered the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in 1924.
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Martha Doan
1872 - 1960 (88 years)
Martha Doan was an American chemist whose contributions include research in compounds of thallium, three published work, and tenure as a professor and dean at various institutions in the US. Throughout her lifetime she received four degrees, a B.S. and master's from Purdue, a B.L. from Earlham College, and a Sc.D. from Cornell. She was a dean of women for two colleges, Earlham College and Iowa Wesleyan College. In addition to her involvement in higher education, she was involved with several national organizations that involved chemistry and science. She was awarded a certificate for Outstanding Service to Science in 1951.
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Wilhelm Klemm
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Wilhelm Karl Klemm was an inorganic and physical chemist. Klemm did extensive work on intermetallic compounds, rare earth metals, transition elements and compounds involving oxygen and fluorine. He and Heinrich Bommer were the first to isolate elemental erbium and ytterbium . Klemm refined Eduard Zintl's ideas about the structure of intermetallic compounds and their connections to develop the Zintl-Klemm concept.
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Abraham Langlet
1868 - 1936 (68 years)
Nils Abraham Langlet was a Swedish chemist. Biography Langlet was born in Södertälje, Sweden. He was the son of architect Emil Victor Langlet and his wife, author Clara Mathilda Ulrika Clementine Söderén . His brothers included author Valdemar Langlet .
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František Wald
1861 - 1930 (69 years)
František "Franz" Wald was a Czech professor of chemistry who contributed to metallurgy, analytical and physical chemistry. He questioned atomic and molecular approaches to understanding chemical phenomena.
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Paul Friedländer
1857 - 1923 (66 years)
Paul Friedländer was a German chemist best known for his research on derivates of indigo and isolation of Tyrian purple from Murex brandaris. Life and work Paul Friedländer was born as son of Ludwig Friedländer in Königsberg in 1857. The chemist Carl Gräbe was a regular guest of his father; thus after finishing the gymnasium, Friedländer studied chemistry in Königsberg in the laboratories of Gräbe. Later he studied at the Strasbourg and Munich where he assisted Adolf von Baeyer. He received his PhD for the work with Baeyer and completed his habilitation in 1883. He left the well-equipped laboratories of Baeyer in Munich in 1884 to work in the small company K.
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Boy Prof Dr Dipl-chem Cornils
#7116
Franz Leopold Sonnenschein
1817 - 1879 (62 years)
Franz Leopold Sonnenschein was a German chemist from Cologne. He taught himself pharmacy, and in the 1830s, established a small laboratory in Berlin. He worked with a physician as tutor for pharmacy students, readying them for their final exams. At the same time, he studied chemistry and in 1852 obtained his habilitation. He dedicated himself to analytic chemistry and involved himself in practical activities, for which he gained prestige. Many technical enterprises owed their success to him. He promoted analytic and judicial chemistry by numerous scientific investigations. From 1869 up until ...
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Richard Pribram
1847 - 1928 (81 years)
Richard Pribram was an Austrian chemist. He was the brother of internist Alfred Pribram . Biography Pribram was born on 21 April 1847 in Prague. He studied chemistry in Prague and Munich , later becoming an assistant of organic chemistry at the University of Leipzig. In 1872 he earned his habilitation at Prague, where he worked as a lecturer until 1874. He later taught classes at the University of Czernowitz, becoming a full professor of general and analytical chemistry in 1879. At Czernowitz he served as dean to the faculty and rector .
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Fritz Weigert
1876 - 1947 (71 years)
Fritz Weigert was a German physical chemist. Weigert has made major contributions in the field of photochemistry. He was born in Berlin. He was the nephew of both Karl Weigert and Paul Ehrlich. He was married to Margarete Behmer. Around 1908, he began teaching and conducting research at Berlin University - after studying there. He was a photochemistry professor at Leipzig University from 1914 until being, like other Jewish scientists, forced out by the Nazis in 1934. On January 1, 1935, he immigrated to England and in 1936 was director of the Physiochemical Department of the Cancer Research I...
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Leopold von Pebal
1826 - 1887 (61 years)
Leopold von Pebal was an Austrian chemist. In 1851 he obtained his PhD at the University of Graz, followed by several years working as an assistant at the Joanneum. In 1855 he became a privat-docent of theoretical chemistry. Afterwards, he continued his education at Heidelberg, where he studied with Robert Bunsen and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff . From 1857 onward, he worked as an associate professor at the University of Lemberg.
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Marc Delafontaine
1838 - 1911 (73 years)
Marc Delafontaine was a Swiss chemist and spectroscopist who was involved in discovering and investigating some of the rare earth elements. Career Delafontaine studied with Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac at the University of Geneva. He also worked at the University of Geneva.
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Mieczysław Centnerszwer
1874 - 1944 (70 years)
Mieczysław Centnerszwer was a Polish chemist and professor at the Technical University of Riga and at the University of Warsaw. He was killed by the Gestapo, as a Jew in hiding. Life Centnerszwer was born in Warsaw, son of Gabriel Centnerszwer and was a grandson of the mathematician Jakub Centnerszwer. He studied chemistry at the University of Leipzig and received a doctorate in 1898 under the supervision of Wilhelm Ostwald. While in Leipzig, he met Franciszka Anna Beck, who converted to Judaism and they married in 1900. He worked as a professor at the Riga Polytechnic from 1917 to 1919 and then at the University of Latvia until 1929.
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Edward Weston
1850 - 1936 (86 years)
Edward Weston was an English-born American chemist and engineer noted for his achievements in electroplating and his development of the electrochemical cell, named the Weston cell, for the voltage standard. Weston was a competitor of Thomas Edison in the early days of electricity generation and distribution.
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William Gregory
1803 - 1858 (55 years)
William Gregory FRCPE FRSE FCS was a Scottish physician and chemist. He studied under and translated some of the works of Justus von Liebig, the German chemist. Gregory also had interests in mesmerism and phrenology.
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Hermann Otto Laurenz Fischer
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Hermann Otto Laurenz Fischer was a German American professor of biochemistry and son of Emil Fischer. Fischer's work was on synthesis and the determination of structures of organic compounds. Fischer was born the eldest son in Würzburg to Emil Fischer, professor of chemistry, and Agnes Gerlach. The family moved to Berlin in 1892 where Fischer went to the Gymnasium. While the other two brothers sought medical careers, he chose chemistry, studying in Cambridge in 1907 after being impressed by Sir William Ramsay who had made a family visit. He then joining for military service. He then went to the University of Berlin and later Jena where he studied tautomerism of diketones under Ludwig Knorr.
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Johann Florian Heller
1813 - 1871 (58 years)
Johann Florian Heller was an Austrian chemist who was one of the founders of clinical chemistry. Heller was born in Vienna, Austria. He studied chemistry in Prague and later with Liebig and Wöhler at Giessen. During those studies he characterized rhodizonic acid and its potassium salt .
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Karl Wilhelm Rosenmund
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Karl Wilhelm Louis Rosenmund was a German chemist. He was born in Berlin and died in Kiel. Rosenmund studied chemistry and received his Ph.D. 1906 from University of Berlin for his work with Otto Diels. He discovered the Rosenmund reduction, which is the reduction of acid chlorides to aldehydes over palladium on barium sulfate as catalyst . The Rosenmund–von Braun reaction, the conversion of an aryl bromide to an aryl nitrile is also named after him. Rosenmund-Kuhnhenn method is suitable for the determination of iodine value in conjugated systems .
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Friedrich Walchner
1799 - 1865 (66 years)
Friedrich August Walchner was a German geologist, chemist and mineralogist. Life Walchner was born in Meersburg. He studied in Göttingen and at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. In 1817 he joined the Corps Rhenania Freiburg. In Freiburg he was member of the Burschenschaft Genossenschaft/Verein zur Bearbeitung wissenschaftlicher Gegenstände and by the year 1818 he was member of the Alten Freiburger Burschenschaft . In Freiburg he habilitated in 1823 and became a private lecturer and associate professor. In 1825 he was appointed to professor in mineralogy, geology and chemistry at the...
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Anatoli Kapustinskii
1906 - 1960 (54 years)
Anatoli Fyodorovich Kapustinskii was a Soviet chemist. He derived the Kapustinskii equation that allows an estimation of the lattice energy of an ionic crystal. Biography Kapustinskii was born in Zhytomyr, Russian Empire . In 1914 he entered the Warsaw Primary Gymnasium, in 1922 he finished a Secondary School in Moscow. In 1923 he began his studies of chemistry at Moscow State University. He graduated there in 1929. From 1929 to 1941 he worked at the Institute of Applied Mineralogy in Moscow. During this time he worked in Western Europe and in the United States where he spent about six months working with Gilbert N.
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Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 2nd Baronet
1817 - 1880 (63 years)
Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 2nd Baronet FRS was an English chemist. Biography Brodie was the son of Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet, and his wife Anne , and was educated at Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford. He obtained a second-class honours degree in mathematics in 1838. Because he was an agnostic and would not assent to the Thirty-nine articles, he was refused a MA until 1860. He studied chemistry with Justus von Liebig in Giessen along with Alexander Williamson. At Giessen, he did an original analysis of beeswax for which he was given the Fellowship of the Royal Society ...
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Lotte Pusch
1890 - 1983 (93 years)
Lotte Pusch was born on 7 August 1890 in Reichenbach/O.L. and was a German physical chemist. She was of the Protestant denomination. Her father was a District Court Director. Education Pusch visited secondary schools in Pleß, Glogau , and Görlitz before deciding to attend the Mädchen-Realgymnasium Chamissoschule school in Schönberg. She later attended the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität . During her first two semesters, she focused on mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In 1913, Pusch passed her university exams and began to study for her Ph.D. in physical chemistry. She earned her doctorate i...
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Aldo Mieli
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Aldo Mieli was an influential historian of science, and a pioneer of gay rights. Early life and education Born in 1879 in Livorno, Italy to a wealthy Jewish family, Mieli was raised in Chianciano, a small spa town in Tuscany, to which his family moved in 1880.
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Osman Achmatowicz
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Osman Achmatowicz was a Polish chemist of Lipka Tatar descent, who studied alkaloid natural products. His son, Osman Achmatowicz Jr., is credited with the Achmatowicz reaction in 1971. Biography Professor Osman Achmatowicz was a Polish Tatar of Islamic confession. The sixth of eight children in the noble family of jurist Alexander Achmatowicz, he was born at the ancestral estate Bergaliszki, near Oszmania, on 16 March 1899.
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Wilhelm Lossen
1838 - 1906 (68 years)
Wilhelm Clemens Lossen was a German chemist. He was the brother of geologist Karl August Lossen. From 1857 he studied chemistry at the University of Giessen, then continued his education at Göttingen as a pupil of Friedrich Wöhler. After graduation, he worked as an assistant to Karl Weltzien at the polytechnic in Karlsruhe and as an assistant under Wilhelm Heinrich Heintz at the University of Halle. In 1870 he became an associate professor at Heidelberg, then in 1877 accepted a position as professor of chemistry at the University of Königsberg.
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Vyacheslav Lebedinsky
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Vyacheslav Vasilyevich Lebedinsky was a Russian and Soviet chemist who worked on platinum, rhodium and iridium, their extraction and use in catalysis. He also worked on complex compounds of rhodium and iridium. He was also a noted teacher and guided 20 doctoral students in inorganic chemistry.
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Sonia Cotelle
1896 - 1945 (49 years)
Sonia Cotelle, née Slobodkine , was a Polish radiochemist. Life and work Sonia Cotelle was born in Warsaw, capital of the Vistula Land, in the Russian Empire on 19 June 1896. She was married, but later divorced. She graduated from the University of Paris in 1922, where she majored in chemistry. While still a student she began working in 1919 as an assistant in the Institute of Radium founded by the Nobel Laureates, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre, in the university's Faculty of Science . Cotelle was in charge of the measurement service between 1924 and 1926, after which she was appointed as a chemist in the Faculté des sciences.
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Friedrich Rochleder
1819 - 1874 (55 years)
Friedrich Rochleder was an Austrian chemist born in Vienna. Son of pharmacist Anton Rochleder, he studied medicine at the University of Vienna, earning his doctorate in 1842. Afterwards he studied chemistry in Giessen with Justus von Liebig , followed by several months spent in Paris and London. In 1845 he was appointed professor of technical chemistry at the newly founded technical academy in Lviv. Later he served as professor of chemistry at Charles University in Prague , and professor of general and pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Vienna . In 1848 he became a full member of t...
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Frans Maurits Jaeger
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Frans Maurits Jaeger was a Dutch chemist and specialist in the history of chemistry. He is known for his studies of the symmetry of crystals. Biography Frans Maurits Jaeger was born on May 11, 1877, in The Hague, The Netherlands. He started studying chemistry in Leiden in 1895, passing his degree in 1898, and his doctorate in 1900. Thereafter he also studied crystallography in Berlin, Germany.
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Alfons Oscar Saligny
1853 - 1903 (50 years)
Alfons Oscar Saligny was a Romanian chemist. The brother of engineer Anghel Saligny, he was the first child born to a family of intellectuals in Focșani in Moldavia; his father Alfred, of French origin, had settled in the region in the late 1840s. Saligny began his education in a school for wealthy families founded by his father, which emphasized mastery of the French language. He went on to study at the Focșani Gymnasium. He then enrolled in Berlin University, studying under August Wilhelm von Hofmann. He obtained a doctorate in 1875, with a dissertation on organic chemistry.
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Eugen Piwowarsky
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Eugen Piwowarsky was a German metallurgist. Piwowarsky was born in Leschnitz , Prussian Silesia, and educated at the Technische Hochschule Breslau. He taught at RWTH Aachen and died in Aachen. Literary works Hochwertiger Grauguss und die physikalisch-metallurgischen Grundlagen seiner Herstellung, 1929
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Anton Schrötter von Kristelli
1802 - 1875 (73 years)
Anton Schrötter von Kristelli was an Austrian chemist and mineralogist born in Olomouc, Moravia. His son Leopold Schrötter Ritter von Kristelli was a noted laryngologist. Academic background Anton's father was an apothecary. He initially studied medicine in Vienna at the request of his father, but switched to the natural sciences under the influence of Friedrich Mohs . In 1827 he became an assistant to mathematician Andreas von Ettingshausen and to physicist Andreas von Baumgartner at the University of Vienna. Three years later he was appointed professor of physics and chemistry at the Joa...
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Aleksander Burba
1918 - 1984 (66 years)
Aleksander Adolfovich Burba was a Soviet organizer of industry and education, scholar of chemical and metallurgical technologies, and university professor. He served as the Director of the Mednogorsk Copper-Sulfur Plant and the first Rector of the Orenburg Polytechnic Institute . Burba was named an Honorary Citizen of Mednogorsk, Orenburg Oblast, in 1979.
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Johan Afzelius
1753 - 1837 (84 years)
Johan Afzelius was a Swedish chemist and notable as the doctoral advisor of one of the founders of modern chemistry, Jöns Jacob Berzelius. He was the brother of botanist Adam Afzelius and physician Pehr von Afzelius.
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Angelo Sala
1576 - 1637 (61 years)
Angelo Sala was an Italian doctor and early iatrochemist. He promoted chemical remedies and, drawing on the relative merits of the conflicting chemical and Galenical systems of medicine, dismissed alchemical transmutation and 'universal medicine'; objected to tartar which had deliquesced being called an 'oil'; observed that metals reacted differently with acids; that sulphur extracted something from the air in order to burn; that silver nitrate darkened on exposure to light; surmised the existence of elementary particles; and described newly discovered compounds and methods of preparation. ...
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Edward Turner
1798 - 1837 (39 years)
Edward Turner FRS FRSE FRCPE was a Jamaican-born, British physician and chemist, known for his work on atomic weights, and as a populariser of the atomic theory of Dalton. He was the author of a popular chemistry textbook that was the first to incorporate chemical symbols and formulae as well as organic chemistry.
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Jakub Natanson
1832 - 1884 (52 years)
Jakub Natanson was a Polish chemist and banker, one of the discoverers of Fuchsine. He wrote the first textbook on organic chemistry in the Polish language. Life He was born 20 August 1832 in Warsaw as the son of a banker. From 1852 to 1856 he studied chemistry at the Universität Dorpat with a master’s degree in 1856, where he synthesized fuchsine in the master’s thesis . He then trained from 1858 to 1862 in Germany, France and Great Britain with leading chemists and in 1862 became Professor of Chemistry at the Szkoła Główna Warszawska in Warsaw. In 1856 he found two new urea syntheses.
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Tse‐lok Ho
#7147
Gerhard Norbert Schrauzer
#7148
Alexander Mitscherlich
1836 - 1918 (82 years)
Alexander Mitscherlich was a German chemist and son of Eilhard Mitscherlich. He studied at University of Göttingen, where he also became member of Burschenschaft Hannovera . His most important work was in the field of processing wood to create cellulose. He patented an early version of the sulfite process in 1882.
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Martha Annie Whiteley
1866 - 1956 (90 years)
Martha Annie Whiteley, was an English chemist and mathematician. She was instrumental in advocating for women's entry into the Chemical Society, and was best known for her dedication to advancing women's equality in the field of chemistry. She is identified as one of the Royal Society of Chemistry's 175 Faces of Chemistry.
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Herbert McLeod
1841 - 1923 (82 years)
Herbert McLeod, FRS was an English chemist, noted for the invention of the McLeod gauge and for the invention of a sunshine recorder. Biography McLeod was born in Stoke Newington on 9 Feb 1841 and died 3 October 1923, while other biographies state that he was born in Stoke Newington on 19 February 1841 and died 1 October 1923, a further alternative biography states that he was born 19 February 1842 in the adjacent area of Stamford Hill, North London, and died in Richmond, Surrey on 1 October 1923.
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