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,
#7101
Karel Wiesner
1919 - 1986 (67 years)
Karel František Wiesner was a Canadian chemist of Czech origin known for his contributions to the chemistry of natural products, notably aconitum alkaloids and digitalis glycosides. Early life and career He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, into a family of some wealth and notability. His undergraduate education began in 1938 when he enrolled to study natural sciences at Charles University. His studies were interrupted the following year when universities were shuttered under the German occupation. Working under the supervision of at Bulovka Hospital, and in a rudimentary laboratory in th...
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Robert Feulgen
1884 - 1955 (71 years)
Joachim Wilhelm Robert Feulgen was a German physician and chemist who, in 1914, developed a method for staining DNA and who also discovered plant and animal nuclear DNA congeniality.
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Lucius Trant O'Shea
1858 - 1920 (62 years)
Lucius Trant O'Shea was a British chemist and mining engineer; between 1908 and 1920 he acted as the general secretary of the Institution of Mining Engineers of Great Britain. Biography O'Shea was the eldest son of Major R. P. O'Shea; he was also a grandson of admiral Lucius Curtis and a descendant from admiral Lord Rodney. He was educated at the Manchester Grammar School, and completed his chemical training at Owens College. Afterwards he acted as private assistant to C. Schorlemmer, and took part in the research on the constitution of aurine. Later he worked as chemist in an explosives fact...
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Alfred Holmes White
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Alfred Holmes White was a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan. Biography He was born in Peoria, Illinois to Samuel Holmes White and Jennie McLaren. He married Rebecca Mason Downey on July 28, 1903, and had two children.
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Thomas Stewart Patterson
1872 - 1949 (77 years)
Thomas Stewart Patterson FRSE LLD was a Scottish organic chemist. Early life and education He was born in Greenock, in 1872, but his family came to Edinburgh in his youth and he was then educated at Merchiston Castle School. He then studied Chemistry at Andersonian college in Glasgow under Prof William Dittmar.
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Åke Gerhard Ekstrand
1846 - 1933 (87 years)
Åke Gerhard Ekstrand , was a Swedish chemist and public servant. Ekstrand became a student in Uppsala in 1865, Bachelor of Arts in 1872, Docent in chemistry at Uppsala University in 1875 and the same year Doctor of Philosophy . As Byzantine scholar he studied chemistry 1877–1878 at the University of Zurich and the University of Munich. He was 1879-1889 the commercial chemist in Uppsala, was appointed in 1889 as a teacher at Chalmers educational institution in Gothenburg and was with beginning in 1890 the Technical Officer at the Ministry of Finance control and adjustment bureau, chief engine...
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Christoph Mangold
1719 - 1767 (48 years)
Christoph Andreas Mangold was a German professor of anatomy at the University of Jena, who also studied chemistry. Christoph Mangold received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Erfurt in 1751. He was a member of the Academie der Wissenschaften of Erfurt.
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Samuel Morison Brown
1817 - 1856 (39 years)
Samuel Morison Brown , Scottish chemist, poet and essayist. Life Brown was born at Haddington, East Lothian, the fourth son of Samuel Brown, the founder of itinerating libraries, and grandson of John Brown, author of the Self-Interpreting Bible. In 1832, he entered the university of Edinburgh, where, after studying in Berlin and St. Petersburg, he graduated as MD in 1839.
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Karl August Neumann
1771 - 1866 (95 years)
Karl August Neumann was a German-Austrian chemist, known for contributions made towards the development of the sugar and flax industries in Bohemia. Beginning in 1793 he studied cameralistics at the University of Jena. From 1796 he spent several years as a teacher of commercial sciences on the Danish island of Als, then in 1802 relocated to Bohemia as head of a cotton factory in Josefsthal-Kosmanos. He made the acquaintance of Franz Josef von Gerstner, who in 1807 appointed him to the Polytechnic Institute in Prague, where from 1808 to 1817, Neumann worked as a professor of chemistry. In 1817...
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Theodor Poleck
1821 - 1906 (85 years)
Thomas August Theodor Poleck was a German chemist and pharmacist born in Neisse. He studied at Giessen in the laboratory of Justus von Liebig, and in 1846 travelled to Berlin, where he passed the state examination. Afterwards he worked in his father's pharmacy, and for several years , taught classes at a Realschule in Neisse. In 1867 he succeeded Adolph Ferdinand Duflos as director of the pharmaceutical institute at the University of Breslau. In 1887/88 he was dean of his faculty and in 1888/89 served as rector of the university.
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Arthur Pillans Laurie
1861 - 1949 (88 years)
Prof Arthur Pillans Laurie FRSE LLD was a Scottish chemist who pioneered the scientific analysis of paintings, especially by Rembrandt. He also was a fascist sympathiser who opposed the Second World War.
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Martin J. Kushmerick
#7113
William Henry Chandler
1841 - 1906 (65 years)
William Henry Chandler was an American chemist. Biography William Henry Chandler was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on December 13, 1841, to Charles Chandler and Sarah Whitney. Chandler had two siblings, a brother named Charles, and a sister named Catherine. He was educated at Union College, and from 1862 to 1867 he was a chemist for various companies. From 1868 to 1871 Chandler was an instructor in chemistry at the Columbia School of Mines. He received a Ph.D. from Hamilton College in 1872. In 1871, he became a professor of chemistry at Lehigh University. Chandler was a fellow of the Chemical Society of London, and a member of the Chemical Societies of Paris and New York.
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Aleksander Kocwa
1901 - 1959 (58 years)
Aleksander Kocwa was a Polish chemist, professor of the Jagiellonian University, dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Jagiellonian University and of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Medical College in Kraków. Arrested during Sonderaktion Krakau, he was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. After the release he organized secret teaching for students of pharmacy and chemistry in Nazi-occupied Kraków.
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Hans-Werner Wanzlick
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Hans-Werner Wanzlick was a German chemist. A Professor of chemistry at the Berlin Technical University he is notable for work on persistent carbenes and for proposing the Wanzlick equilibrium between saturated imidazolin-2-ylidenes and their dimerss — which he called "das doppelte Lottchen", after a 1949 novel by Erich Kästner about a pair of mischievous twins.
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Ward V. Evans
1880 - 1957 (77 years)
Ward Vinton Evans was a chemist who served as a professor at Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago. He was known as one of three members of the commission which revoked the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Evans was the only member who voted to allow Oppenheimer to retain his security clearance, stating that failure to clear Oppenheimer would be "a black mark on the escutcheon of our country.".
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Robert Jacobus Forbes
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Robert Jacobus Forbes or Robert James Forbes was a Dutch chemist and historian of science and professor in the history of applied science and technology at the University of Amsterdam. In his days Forbes was internationally one of the best known and respected historian of technology, and recipient of the first Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the highest award by the Society for the History of Technology .
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Charles L. Christ
1916 - 1980 (64 years)
Charles Louis Christ was an American scientist, geochemist and mineralogist. Education He received his Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, completing his Ph.D. in 1940.
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Leo Baekeland
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
Leo Hendrik Baekeland was a Belgian chemist. He is best known for the inventions of Velox photographic paper in 1893, and Bakelite in 1907. He has been called "The Father of the Plastics Industry" for his invention of Bakelite, an inexpensive, non-flammable and versatile plastic, which marked the beginning of the modern plastics industry.
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George Barger
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
George Barger FRS FRSE FCS LLD was a British chemist. Life He was born to an English mother, Eleanor Higginbotham, and Gerrit Barger, a Dutch engineer in Manchester, England. He was educated at Utrecht and The Hague High School. He subsequently attended King's College, Cambridge for his undergraduate degree and University College London to do a doctorate of science. His main work focused on the study of alkaloids and investigations of simple nitrogenous compounds of biological importance. Barger identified tyramine as one of the compounds responsible for the biological activity of ergot extracts.
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J. A. F. Rook
1926 - 1987 (61 years)
John Allan Fynes Rook CBE FRSE FIB FRIC was a 20th-century British chemist connected to the British dairy industry. He was President of the British Society of Animal Production 1982/83. Life He was born on 1 May 1926 the son of Edward Fynes Rook, near Scarborough in North Yorkshire. He was educated at Scarborough High School for Boys, then studied Chemistry at the University of Wales graduating BSc in 1947. He then won an Agricultural Research Council scholarship to do further postgraduate studies.
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William Mansfield Clark
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
William Mansfield Clark was an American chemist and professor at the Johns Hopkins University. He studied oxidation-reduction reactions and was a pioneer of medical biochemistry. Clark was born in Tivoli, New York, in a clergy family and studied at Hotchkiss School and Williams College before entering Johns Hopkins University, where he received a PhD in chemistry under H.N. Morse with a dissertation on A contribution to the investigation of the temperature coefficient of osmotic pressure: a redetermination of the osmotic pressures of cane sugar at 20°. He then worked on dairy bacteriology in ...
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Barnet Woolf
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Barnet Woolf FRSE was a 20th-century British scientist, whose disciplines had a broad scope. He made lasting contributions to biochemistry, genetics, epidemiology, nutrition, public health, statistics, and computer science. His name appears in the Hanes-Woolf plot: a mathematical plotting of chemical reaction times.
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Roscoe G. Dickinson
1894 - 1945 (51 years)
Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson was an American chemist, known primarily for his work on X-ray crystallography. As professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology , he was the doctoral advisor of Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and of Arnold O. Beckman, inventor of the pH meter.
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Wilhelm Steinkopf
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
Georg Wilhelm Steinkopf was a German chemist. Today he is mostly remembered for his work on the production of mustard gas during World War I. Life Georg Wilhelm Steinkopf was born on 28 June 1879 in Staßfurt, in the Prussian Province of Saxony in the German Empire, the son of Gustav Friedrich Steinkopf, a merchant, and his wife Elise Steinkopf .
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Hertha Sponer
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Hertha Sponer was a German physicist and chemist who contributed to modern quantum mechanics and molecular physics and was the first woman on the physics faculty of Duke University. She was the older sister of philologist and resistance fighter Margot Sponer.
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George Wallace Kenner
1922 - 1978 (56 years)
George Wallace Kenner FRS was a British organic chemist. He was born in Sheffield in 1922, the son of Prof. James Kenner. During his childhood, he went to Didsbury Preparatory School in 1928 and moved to Manchester Grammar School in 1934. He was appointed to the first Heath Harrison Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool 1957–1976. He did his MSc and PhD degrees under Lord Todd at Manchester and Cambridge Universities in UK. He married Jillian Bird in 1951 and they had two daughters both born in Cambridge. He was faculty member at the Cambridge University for 15 years befor...
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Claude Hudson
1881 - 1952 (71 years)
Claude Silbert Hudson was an American chemist who is best known for his work in the area of carbohydrate chemistry. He is also the namesake of the Claude S. Hudson Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry given by the American Chemical Society.
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Georg Wittig
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Georg Wittig was a German chemist who reported a method for synthesis of alkenes from aldehydes and ketones using compounds called phosphonium ylides in the Wittig reaction. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Herbert C. Brown in 1979.
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Charles R. Hauser
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Charles Roy Hauser was an American chemist. Hauser was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a professor of chemistry at Duke University. Notable work The Sommelet–Hauser rearrangement is a named reaction based on the work of Hauser and Sommelet involving the rearrangement of certain benzyl quaternary ammonium salts. The reagent is sodium amide or another alkali metal amide and the reaction product a N,N-dialkylbenzylamine with a new alkyl group in the aromatic ortho position. For example, benzyltrimethylammonium iodide, [N3]I, rearranges in the presence of sodium amide to yield t...
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T. R. Seshadri
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Thiruvengadam Rajendram Seshadri FNA, FRS was an Indian chemist, academic, writer and the Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Delhi, known for his researches on the Indian medicinal and other plants. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, UK and an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Besides several articles, he also published two books, Chemistry of Vitamins and Hormones and Advancement of Scientific and Religious Culture in India. The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 1963, for his contribu...
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Karl Freudenberg
1886 - 1983 (97 years)
Karl Johann Freudenberg was a German chemist who did early seminal work on the absolute configurations to carbohydrates, terpenes, and steroids, and on the structure of cellulose and other polysaccharides, and on the nature, structure, and biosynthesis of lignin. The Research Institute for the Chemistry of Wood and Polysaccharides at the University of Heidelberg was created for him in the mid to late 1930s, and he led this until 1969.
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Yakov Zeldovich
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich , also known as YaB, was a leading Soviet physicist of Belarusian origin, who is known for his prolific contributions in physical cosmology, physics of thermonuclear reactions, combustion, and hydrodynamical phenomena.
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Arthur Lindo Patterson
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Arthur Lindo Patterson was a pioneering British X-ray crystallographer. Patterson was born to British parents in New Zealand in 1902. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Montreal, Canada and later to London, England. In 1920 Patterson moved to Canada for college at McGill University, Montreal. Firstly he concentrated on Mathematics and but then changed his major to Physics. He received his bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's in 1924. His master's thesis was on the production of hard X-rays by interaction of radium β rays with solids.
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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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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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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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Paul L. Kirk
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Paul Leland Kirk was a biochemist, criminalist and participant in the Manhattan Project who was specialized in microscopy. He also investigated the bedroom in which Sam Sheppard supposedly murdered his wife and provided the key blood spatter evidence that led to his acquittal in a retrial over 12 years after the murder. The highest honor one can receive in the criminalistics section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences carries Kirk's name.
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A. D. Walsh
1916 - 1977 (61 years)
Arthur Donald Walsh FRS FRSE FRIC was a British chemist, who served as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Dundee. He is usually referred to as Donald Walsh. He was the creator of the Walsh diagram and Walsh's Rules.
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Frederick George Mann
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Frederick George Mann was a British organic chemist. Academic career He completed his doctoral studies at Downing College, Cambridge under Sir William Pope, graduating in 1923. He continued at Downing as an assistant lecturer until 1930, when he was appointed to a lectureship at Trinity College. He spent his entire academic career at Cambridge, retiring in 1964.
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Willis H. Flygare
1936 - 1981 (45 years)
Willis H. Flygare was an American physical chemist and professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Background Flygare was born in Jackson, Minnesota. He was the son of Willis B. and Doris H. Flygare, both of whom were of Scandinavian descent. He attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, from which he graduated in 1958 with majors in chemistry, physics, and mathematics. He later attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1961.
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George de Hevesy
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
George Charles de Hevesy was a Hungarian radiochemist and Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, recognized in 1943 for his key role in the development of radioactive tracers to study chemical processes such as in the metabolism of animals. He also co-discovered the element hafnium.
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Robert Garrels
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Robert Minard Garrels was an American geochemist. Garrels applied experimental physical chemistry data and techniques to geology and geochemistry problems. The book Solutions, Minerals, and Equilibria co-authored in 1965 by Garrels and Charles L. Christ revolutionized aqueous geochemistry.
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Ulrich Hofmann
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Ulrich Hofmann was a German chemist known for his study of clay minerals and the pioneering use of electron microscopes in the study of carbonaceous materials. Education and career Hofmann was born in Munich in 1903 and the son of the German chemist Karl Andreas Hofmann. He studied chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin and obtained a diploma in 1925. He went on to receive his doctorate in 1926 from his father with the work Glanzkohlenstoff und die Reihe des schwarzen kristallinen Kohlenstoffs . In 1931 he received habilitation on graphite oxide and then worked as a lecturer at the T...
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Charles D. Coryell
1912 - 1971 (59 years)
Charles DuBois Coryell was an American chemist who was one of the discoverers of the element promethium. Coryell earned a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1935 as the student of Arthur A. Noyes. During the late 1930s he engaged in research on the structure of hemoglobin in association with Linus Pauling. He also taught at UCLA before 1942. In 1942 he accepted a job with the Manhattan Project, for which he was Chief of the Fission Products Section, both at the University of Chicago and at Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee . His group had responsibility for character...
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Denis Jordan
1914 - 1982 (68 years)
Denis Oswald Jordan AO FAA FRACI was an Anglo-Australian chemist with a distinguished career as a researcher and lecturer in Chemistry at both University College Nottingham and the University of Adelaide, where he was Angas Professor of Chemistry from 1958 to 1982. Jordan also served as president of Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering from 1958 to 1962, and Royal Australian Chemical Institute from 1978 to 1979.
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Francis William Aston
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Francis William Aston FRS was a British chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes in many non-radioactive elements and for his enunciation of the whole number rule. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Bernd Eistert
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Bernd Eistert was a German chemist. Together with Fritz Arndt he discovered the Arndt-Eistert synthesis. Life Eistert was born in Ohlau , Prussian Silesia. After he received his PhD in Breslau in 1927 for his work with Fritz Arndt he worked for the BASF company from 1929 till 1943. He worked at the Technical University of Darmstadt from 1943 till 1957 when he changed to the University of Saarbrücken, where he retired in 1971.
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Klaus Clusius
1903 - 1963 (60 years)
Klaus Paul Alfred Clusius was a German physical chemist from Breslau , Silesia. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on isotope separation techniques and heavy water production. After the war, he was a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Zurich. He died in Zurich.
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