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,
#7151
Carl Schmidt
1822 - 1894 (72 years)
Carl Ernst Heinrich Schmidt , also known in Russia as Karl Genrikhovich Schmidt , was a Baltic German chemist from the Governorate of Livonia, a part of the Russian Empire. Biography Schmidt received his PhD in 1844 from the University of Gießen under Justus von Liebig. In 1845, he first announced the presence in the test of some Ascidians of what he called "tunicine", a substance very similar to cellulose. Tunicine now is regarded as cellulose and correspondingly a remarkable substance to find in an animal.
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Heinrich Biltz
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
Heinrich Biltz was a German chemist and professor. Life and career Heinrich Biltz was the son of Karl Friedrich Biltz who was a literary scholar and theatre critic His brother Wilhelm Biltz was also a noted chemist.
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Thomas Andrews
1813 - 1885 (72 years)
Thomas Andrews FRS FRSE was an Irish chemist and physicist who did important work on phase transitions between gases and liquids. He was a longtime professor of chemistry at Queen's University of Belfast.
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Hans Hübner
1837 - 1884 (47 years)
Hans Hübner was a German chemist. He was the son of painter Julius Hübner . He studied chemistry at the University of Göttingen, receiving his doctorate in 1859 with a dissertation on acrolein. Following graduation, he continued his education at the University of Heidelberg with Robert Bunsen and at the University of Ghent under August Kekulé. In 1863 he obtained his habilitation at Göttingen, where from 1864 he worked as an assistant at the institute of chemistry under Friedrich Wöhler. In 1870 he became an associate professor, followed by a full professorship in 1874. In 1882 he succeeded W...
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Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp
1817 - 1892 (75 years)
Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp , German chemist, was born at Hanau, where his father, Johann Heinrich Kopp , a physician, was professor of chemistry, physics and natural history at the local lyceum. After attending the gymnasium of his native town, he studied at Marburg and Heidelberg, and then, attracted by the fame of Liebig, went in 1839 to Gießen, where he became a privatdozent in 1841, and professor of chemistry twelve years later. In 1864 he was called to Heidelberg in the same capacity, and he remained there until his death.
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Franz Sondheimer
1926 - 1981 (55 years)
Franz Sondheimer FRS was a German-born British professor of chemistry. In 1960, he was awarded the Israel Prize for his contributions to science. Biography Franz Sondheimer was born in Stuttgart on 17 May 1926, the second son of Max and Ida Sondheimer. His father ran the family glue manufacturing business. His elder brother, Ernst, was Professor of Mathematics at Westfield College. Having business connections in England, Max Sondheimer managed to get his family to London in September 1937. Sondheimer, knowing no English, began his schooling in England first at Southend and then at Hailey School in Bournemouth.
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Ernst Otto Beckmann
1853 - 1923 (70 years)
Ernst Otto Beckmann was a German pharmacist and chemist who is remembered for his invention of the Beckmann differential thermometer and for his discovery of the Beckmann rearrangement. Scientific work Ernst Otto Beckmann was born in Solingen, Germany on July 4, 1853, to a family headed by Johannes Friedrich Wilhelm Beckmann, a manufacturer. The elder Beckmann's factory produced mineral dyes, pigments, abrasives, and polishing material, and it was there that the younger Beckmann conducted his early chemical experiments. At the age of 17, Beckmann was persuaded by his father to study pharmacy instead of chemistry, and so in 1870 an apprenticeship was arranged in Elberfeld.
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Wilhelm Körner
1839 - 1925 (86 years)
Wilhelm Körner, later a.k.a. Guglielmo Körner , was a German chemist. Life Körner studied chemistry at Giessen, where he graduated in 1860. In 1866, he became assistant to Kekulé at Ghent. In 1867, when Kekulé was called to Bonn, Körner left Ghent for Palermo where entered the laboratory of Stanislao Cannizzaro, and occupied himself with the study of the aromatic compounds. Besides his work on aromatic compounds, his interest in botany led him to the study of many vegetable substances. In 1870, he accepted the chair of organic chemistry at "Scuola Superiore di Agricoltura" , where he retained ...
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Oscar Loew
1844 - 1941 (97 years)
Oscar Loew was a German agricultural chemist, active in Germany, the United States, and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Biography Loew was born in Marktredwitz, Bavaria, where his father was a pharmacist. He studied at the University of Munich under the noted chemist Justus von Liebig; he was Liebig's last student. Loew was an assistant in plant physiology at the City College of New York and participated in four expeditions to the southwestern United States in 1882 before returning to Munich, Germany, where he collaborated with Carl Nägeli. Loew became associate professor at Munich University in 1886.
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Thomas Edward Thorpe
1845 - 1925 (80 years)
Sir Thomas Edward Thorpe CB, FRS HFRSE LLD was a British chemist. From 1894 to 1909 he was Chief Chemist to the British Government, as Director of the Government Laboratory. Early life and education Thorpe was born at Barnes Green in Harpurhey, Manchester, the son of George Thorpe, a cotton merchant at Trafford Bank, and his wife Mary Wilde. He was educated at Hulme Grammar School.
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William C. Boyd
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
William Clouser Boyd was an American immunochemist. In the 1930s, with his wife Lyle, he made a worldwide survey of the distribution of blood types. Biography Born in Dearborn, Missouri, Boyd was educated at Harvard and Boston University. His career led to appointment as Professor of Immunochemistry at Boston University.
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Louis Camille Maillard
1878 - 1936 (58 years)
Louis Camille Maillard was a French physician and chemist. He made important contributions to the study of kidney disorders. He also became known for the "Maillard reaction", the chemical reaction which he described in 1912, by which amino acids and sugars react in foods via contact with fats, giving a browned, flavorful surface to everything from bread and seared steaks to toasted marshmallows.
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Nikolai Kurnakov
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
Nikolai Semyonovich Kurnakov was a Russian chemist, who is internationally recognized as the originator of physicochemical analysis. He also was one of the principal founders of the platinum industry in the Soviet Union. A chemical reaction that he pioneered, known as the Kurnakov test, is still used to differentiate cis from trans isomers of divalent platinum and is his best-known contribution to coordination chemistry.
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Percy F. Frankland
1858 - 1946 (88 years)
Percy Faraday Frankland CBE FRS was a British chemist. He was the second son and youngest child of Edward Frankland, chemist, and Sophie Fick, sister of Adolf Eugen Fick. He was born at 42 Park Road, Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, on 3 October 1858. Michael Faraday was his godfather.
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Vojtěch Šafařík
1829 - 1902 (73 years)
Vojtěch Šafařík was a Czech chemist, specialising in inorganic chemistry. Šafařík was the son of Pavel Jozef Šafárik, a Slovak philologist and historian. The crater Šafařík on the Moon is named after him, and so is the minor planet 8336 Šafařík .
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Umetaro Suzuki
1874 - 1943 (69 years)
was a Japanese scientist, born in what is now part of Makinohara, Shizuoka, Japan. He was a member of the Imperial Academy, and a recipient of the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Order of Culture. His research was among the earliest of modern vitamin research.
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Thomas Anderson
1819 - 1874 (55 years)
Thomas Anderson was a 19th-century Scottish chemist. In 1853 his work on alkaloids led him to discover the correct formula/composition for codeine. In 1868 he discovered pyridine and related organic compounds such as picoline through studies on the distillation of bone oil and other animal matter.
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Nikolai Shilov
1872 - 1930 (58 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Shilov was a Russian and Soviet chemist who studied reactions, catalysis, and induction. Shilov was born in Moscow and graduated in 1895 after which he worked in Leipzig in Wilhelm Ostwald's laboratory on chemical kinetics. In 1910 he became a professor of inorganic chemistry at the Moscow Technical College. During World War I he was involved with studies on gas warfare and developed along with N. D. Zelinsky charcoal adsorption masks for the protection of the Russian army. He studied oxidation reactions and introduced several terms including inductor, acceptor, and induction factor.
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Jędrzej Śniadecki
1768 - 1838 (70 years)
Jędrzej Śniadecki was a Polish writer, physician, chemist, biologist and philosopher. His achievements include being the first person who linked rickets to lack of sunlight. He also created modern Polish terminology in the field of chemistry.
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J. Norman Collie
1859 - 1942 (83 years)
Professor John Norman Collie FRSE FRS , commonly referred to as J. Norman Collie, was an English scientist, mountaineer and explorer. Life and work He was born in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, the second of four sons to John Collie and Selina Mary Winkworth. In 1870 the family moved to Clifton, near Bristol, and John was educated initially at Windlesham in Surrey and then in 1873 at Charterhouse School. The family money had been made in the cotton trade, but in 1875 the American Civil War resulted in their financial ruin when their American stock was burnt. Collie had to leave Charterhouse and transfer to Clifton College, Bristol where he realised he was completely unsuited for the classics.
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Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt
1853 - 1933 (80 years)
Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt was a German mineralogist, natural philosopher, and art collector. Life Born 1853 in Mainz, Goldschmidt attended the Bergakademie Freiberg in Saxony and graduated in engineering in 1874. He received his doctorate in 1880 in Heidelberg for his work on mechanical rock analysis and continued his studies in Vienna from 1882 to 1887. In 1888 he wrote his habilitation about "Projektion und graphische Krystallberechnung" under the same supervisor as his doctoral dissertation. He founded the Institut für Mineralogie und Kristallographie in Heidelberg in association wit...
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Robert Behrend
1856 - 1926 (70 years)
Anton Friedrich Robert Behrend was a German analytical organic chemist who made pioneering studies of stereochemistry and isomerism. He was also the first to synthesize uric acid and introduced potentiometric titration. The Behrend rearrangement reaction of nitrones is named after him.
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William A. Noyes
1857 - 1941 (84 years)
William Albert Noyes was an American analytical and organic chemist. He made pioneering determinations of atomic weights, chaired the chemistry department at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign from 1907 to 1926, was the founder and editor of several important chemical journals, and received the American Chemical Society's highest award, the Priestley Medal, in 1935.
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Adrien Albert
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Adrien Albert was a leading authority in the development of medicinal chemistry in Australia. Albert also authored many important books on chemistry, including one on selective toxicity. His father, Jacques Albert, was a businessman in the music industry, and took a bride many years his junior; Mary Eliza Blanche. Albert had two much older half brothers, stemming from his father's previous marriage. After a few years, Jacques died, and so, Adrien Albert was raised by his mother and another relative. Albert attended schools in Randwick and Coogee, but soon settled into the Scots College in Sydney where he excelled in both music and science.
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Alfred E. Treibs
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Alfred E. Treibs was a German organic chemist who is credited with founding the area of organic geochemistry. He received his PhD under Hans Fischer at the Technical University of Munich. Fischer had received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for elucidating the structures of porphyrins.
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William Jackson Pope
1870 - 1939 (69 years)
Sir William Jackson Pope was an English chemist. Biography William Jackson Pope was born on 31 March 1870 in Hoxton to William and Alice . His parents were staunch and active Wesleyans who had eight children, of whom William was the eldest. In 1878 he entered the Central Foundation School, in London, where his ability to learn rapidly gave him leisure at the age of twelve to carry out simple chemical experiments in his bedroom. While at school he also developed great skill as a photographer—many of his early photographs were in perfect condition fifty years later. From there he moved to the...
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Erika Cremer
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Erika Cremer was a German physical chemist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Innsbruck who is regarded as one of the most important pioneers in gas chromatography, as she second conceived the technique in 1944, after Richard Synge and Archer J.P. Martin in 1941.
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William de Wiveleslie Abney
1843 - 1920 (77 years)
Sir William de Wiveleslie Abney was an English astronomer, chemist, and photographer. Life and career Abney was born in Derby, England, the son of Rev. Edward Henry Abney , vicar of St Alkmund's Church, Derby, and his wife, Catharine Strutt. His father was owner of the Firs Estate. William was educated at Rossall School, the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and joined the Royal Engineers in 1861, with which he served in India for several years. Thereafter, and to further his knowledge in photography, he became a chemical assistant at the Chatham School of Military Engineering.
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Francesco Selmi
1817 - 1881 (64 years)
Francesco Selmi was an Italian chemist and patriot, one of the founders of colloid chemistry. Selmi was born in Vignola, then part of the Duchy of Modena and Reggio. He became head of a chemistry laboratory in Modena in 1840, and a professor of chemical pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Bologna in 1867. He published the first systematic study of inorganic colloids, in particular silver chloride, Prussian blue, and sulfur, in the period 1845–50.
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Benjamin Silliman
1779 - 1864 (85 years)
Benjamin Silliman was an early American chemist and science educator. He was one of the first American professors of science, at Yale College, the first person to use the process of fractional distillation in America, and a founder of the American Journal of Science, the oldest continuously published scientific journal in the United States.
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Gustav Embden
1874 - 1933 (59 years)
Gustav Georg Embden was a German physiological chemist. Background Gustav Embden was a son of the Hamburg lawyer and politician George Heinrich Embden. His grandmother Charlotte Heine was a well-known salonnière and a sister of the poet Heinrich Heine.
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William A. Tilden
1842 - 1926 (84 years)
Sir William Augustus Tilden was a British chemist. He discovered that isoprene could be made from turpentine. He was unable to turn this discovery into a way to make commercially viable synthetic rubber.
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Petru Poni
1841 - 1925 (84 years)
Petru Poni was a Moldavian chemist and mineralogist. Born into a family of răzeși in Săcărești, Iași County, he attended primary school in Târgu Frumos. In 1852, he enrolled in Academia Mihăileană; among his teachers were August Treboniu Laurian and Simion Bărnuțiu. He entered the University of Paris in 1865, studying chemistry there. He returned home following graduation, teaching physics and chemistry at Iași's National College and at the military high school. In 1878, he became a professor at the University of Iași, at first teaching at the medicine and science faculties, later only in the mineral chemistry department of the latter.
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Valentin Kargin
1907 - 1969 (62 years)
Valentin Alekseyevich Kargin was a Soviet and Russian chemist who specialized in physical chemistry and established research in polymer chemistry in the Soviet Union. He considered polymerization as a phase transition.
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Gustav Heinrich Johann Apollon Tammann
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Gustav Heinrich Johann Apollon Tammann was a prominent Baltic German chemist-physicist who made important contributions in the fields of glassy and solid solutions, heterogeneous equilibria, crystallization, and metallurgy.
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Frederic Kipping
1863 - 1949 (86 years)
Frederic Stanley Kipping FRS was an English chemist. He undertook much of the pioneering work on silicon polymers and coined the term silicone. Life He was born in Salford, Lancashire, England, the son of James Kipping, a Bank of England official, and Julia Du Val, a daughter of painter Charles Allen Du Val. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School before enrolling in 1879 at Owens College for an external degree from the University of London. After working for the local gas company for a short time he went in 1886 to Germany to work under William Henry Perkin, Jr. in the laboratories of ...
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Friedrich Reinitzer
1857 - 1927 (70 years)
Friedrich Richard Reinitzer was an Austrian botanist and chemist. In late 1880s, experimenting with cholesteryl benzoate, he discovered properties of liquid crystals . Reinitzer was born into a German Bohemian family in Prague. He studied chemistry at the German technical university in Prague; in 1883 he was habilitated there as a private docent. From 1888-1901 he was a professor at Karl-Ferdinands-Universität, then professor at technical university in Graz. During 1909 - 1910 he served as the rector of the university.
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Enrique Moles Ormella
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Enrique Moles Ormella was a Spanish pharmacist, physicist, and chemist, most notable for his work on atomic weights of the elements. Enrique Moles is considered one of the foremost Spanish chemists of his time.
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Lajos Winkler
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Lajos Winkler was a Hungarian analytical chemist. He is best known today for his discovery of the Winkler method for the measurement of oxygen dissolved in water. Life Relatively little is in print in English concerning the life of Lajos Winkler. Winkler studied science at the Budapest University of Science, receiving his doctorate there in 1890, while working with Carl von Than. He stayed on to work as a lecturer, among other positions, and directed the Institute of Chemistry, starting in 1909, for more than 25 years. He is said to have published several hundred papers, to have helped fo...
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Bernhard Rathke
1840 - 1923 (83 years)
Heinrich Bernhard Rathke was a German chemist. He was the son of embryologist Martin Rathke. He studied natural sciences at the University of Königsberg, and afterwards worked in Robert Bunsen's laboratory at Heidelberg. In 1867 he started work as an assistant at the chemical institute of the University of Halle, and two years later obtained his habilitation with a thesis on the history of selenium. From 1873 to 1876 he taught classes in chemistry and chemical engineering at the higher vocational school in Kassel. In 1876 he became an associate professor at Halle, during this time he published what became known as the Rathke synthesis for making guanidinium groups.
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Émile Meyerson
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Émile Meyerson was a Polish-born French epistemologist, chemist, and philosopher of science. Meyerson was born in Lublin, Poland. He died in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of 74. Biography Meyerson was educated at the University of Heidelberg and studied chemistry under Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1882 Meyerson settled in Paris. He served as foreign editor of the Havas news agency, and later as the director of the Jewish Colonization Association for Europe and Asia Minor. He became a naturalized French citizen after World War I.
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Johan Gottschalk Wallerius
1709 - 1785 (76 years)
Johan Gottschalk Wallerius was a Swedish chemist and mineralogist. Biography Wallerius was born at Stora Mellösa in Närke , Sweden. He was a son of provost Erik Nilsson Wallerius and his spouse Elisabeth Tranæa . He was a younger brother to the physicist, philosopher and theologian Nils Wallerius .
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Carl von Than
1834 - 1908 (74 years)
Károly Antal Than de Apát – also called as Carl von Than – was a Hungarian chemist who discovered carbonyl sulfide in 1867. Life AKároly Than was born in Óbecse, Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire . His mother was Otillia Setényi. He interrupted his education and joined the Hungarian army in the war of independence 1848 at the age of 14. On his return, he found his mother dead and his father ruined. Than worked in several pharmacies to earn money form completing his education. After attending a school in Szeged, Than started to study medicine and later chemistry at the University of Vienna. He received his PhD for work with Josef Redtenbacher in 1858.
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Charles A. Kraus
1875 - 1967 (92 years)
Charles August Kraus was an American chemist. He was professor of chemistry and director of the chemical laboratories at Clark University, where he directed the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I.
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Karl Weltzien
1813 - 1870 (57 years)
Karl Weltzien was a German scientist who was Professor of Chemistry at the Technische Hochschule of Karlsruhe from 1848 to 1869. Starting about 1840, Weltzien constructed new laboratories for chemistry research and teaching at Karlsruhe. Weltzien's successor as Professor of Chemistry was Lothar Meyer.
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Arthur George Perkin
1861 - 1937 (76 years)
Arthur George Perkin DSc FRS FRSE was an English chemist and Professor of Colour Chemistry and Dyeing at the University of Leeds. Life Perkin was the second son of Sir William Henry Perkin FRS, who founded the aniline dye industry, and was born on 13 December 1861 at Sudbury, close to his father's dyeworks at Greenford. His mother was Jemima Harriet Lissett . His brother was William Henry Perkin, Jr., FRS, Professor of Chemistry at Manchester and Oxford universities. He was educated at the City of London School . He then studied Chemistry variously at the Royal College of Chemistry in London,...
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Rudolf Mentzel
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
Rudolf Mentzel PhD was a German chemist and a Nazi policy-maker. An influential figure and one of the leading science administrators in Germany's nuclear energy project, Mentzel served as the scientific and technical adviser on the development of atomic bombs to the German government, and on some part, as the director of this program. Originally a Nazi by political orientation, Mentzel served as one of the top leading science policy-makers to Adolf Hitler and his cabinet in his role as an undersecretary of the Reich Ministry of Education in the Office for Science. In the Kaiser Wilhelm Socie...
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Russell Henry Chittenden
1856 - 1943 (87 years)
Russell Henry Chittenden was an American physiological chemist. He conducted pioneering research in the biochemistry of digestion and nutrition. Early life and education He was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1856, graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in 1875, studied in Heidelberg in 1878-79, and received his doctorate at Yale in physiological chemistry in 1880. He was of English ancestry, his first ancestor in America being Major William Chittenden, an officer in the English army, who, having resigned, came to America from Cranbrook, Kent, with his wife, Joanne Sheaffe, in 1639, and settled in Guilford Connecticut.
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Gerold Schwarzenbach
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Gerold Karl Schwarzenbach was a Swiss chemist. Schwarzenbach was born and grew up in Horgen, Switzerland. He studied chemistry at the ETH Zurich and graduated in 1928 with his dissertation Studien über die Salzbildung von Beizenfarbstoffen . From 1930 to 1955 he was a lecturer and later professor of special inorganic and analytical chemistry at the University of Zurich. He retired in 1973.
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Alexander Pedler
1849 - 1918 (69 years)
Sir Alexander Pedler was a British civil servant and chemist who worked in the Presidency College, Calcutta where he influenced early studies in chemistry in India by working with pioneer scientists like Prafulla Chandra Ray. He helped found the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta which in its early days was involved in reaching out to lay citizens interested in science.
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