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,
#7151
James Franklin
1783 - 1834 (51 years)
James Franklin was a British soldier. He was the brother of Sir John Franklin. James Franklin entered the service of the British East India Company as a cadet in 1805. He served with distinction on various Indian surveys and was elected a member of the Royal Society. He was in the 1st Bengal Cavalry and was an authority on geology. He undertook surveys of the Central Provinces and collected birds for the Asiatic Society. He collected about 40 species before reaching Benares, and on reaching Saugor he had collected 160 more specimens and made paintings of these. In 1831 Franklin published descriptions of the birds that he had collected.
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Enid Russell-Smith
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Dame Enid Mary Russell Russell-Smith, DBE was a British civil servant. Career Born in Esher, Surrey to Arthur Russell-Smith and Constance Mary , she attended Saint Felix School, Southwold, and Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1925.
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Edward Stone
1702 - 1768 (66 years)
Edward Stone was a Church of England cleric who discovered the active ingredient of aspirin. Life Edward Stone was born in Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, England, in 1702. His parents were Edward Stone, a gentleman farmer, and his first wife Elizabeth Reynolds. His mother having died, his father took a second wife, Elizabeth Grubb, in 1707; the Grubb family was to play a major role in Stone's life.
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Charles Williams
1804 - 1877 (73 years)
Charles Williams was Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, from 1857 to 1877. Life Williams studied at Jesus College from 1823 to 1827, holding a scholarship and gaining a First in Literae Humaniores. He was then ordained, and was a missionary Fellow of the college from 1829 to 1845. He was headmaster of Ruthin School for a time, before becoming the incumbent of the church at Holyhead in 1845. He was made an honorary canon of Bangor Cathedral in 1856 before being appointed as Principal of Jesus College, Oxford in 1857. He died in the Principal's Lodgings in the college in 1877, aged 70.
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Ethel Hurlbatt
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Ethel Hurlbatt was Principal of Bedford College, University of London, and later Warden of Royal Victoria College, the women's college of McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which had opened in 1899.
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Robert Bellamy Clifton
1836 - 1921 (85 years)
Robert Bellamy Clifton FRS was a British scientist. Academic career Clifton was educated at University College, London and St John's College, Cambridge where he studied under Sir George Stokes. In 1860 he went to Owens College, Manchester as Professor of Natural Philosophy. In 1865 he was appointed Professor of experimental Natural Philosophy at Oxford University. While at Oxford he designed Clarendon Laboratory and gave research space to Charles Vernon Boys. On 4 June 1868 he became a fellow of the Royal Society. He was president of the Physical Society from 1882 until 1884. From 1868 un...
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W. R. Scott
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
William Robert Scott was a political economist who was Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow from 1915 to 1940. Career Born in Omagh, County Tyrone, on 31 August 1868, William Robert Scott was the son of Charles Scott, JP, of Lisnamallard in Omagh. He attended Trinity College, Dublin; graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1889, Scott won the Wray Prize and was First Senior Moderator in Logics and Ethics. He proceeded to a Master of Arts degree two years later, and joined the University of St Andrews in 1896 as assistant to the Professor of Moral Philosophy .
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Paul Harteck
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Paul Karl Maria Harteck was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of aiding the Nazis in their nuclear weapons program and he was incarcerated at Farm Hall, an English house fitted with covert electronic listening devices, for six months.
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Elof Hellquist
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Gustaf Elof Hellquist was a Swedish linguist. He was professor of Nordic languages at Lund University between 1914 and 1929 and authored the standard work Swedish Etymological Dictionary. Biography Elof Hellquist was born on 26 June 1864 in Norrköping and took his matriculation examination there in 1883. He became Doctor of Philosophy in Uppsala in 1890 and worked as docent of Nordic languages and adjunct at a grammar school. Between the years 1894 and 1903 he was an editor of Svenska Akademiens ordbok. He became lecturer of Swedish and German at Lund in 1898 until he went over to Gothenburg in 1903 with the same title, in addition to again serving as docent.
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Jay Switzer
Jay A. Switzer is an American chemist, currently the Curators’ Distinguished Professor and Donald L. Castleman/FCR Missouri Endowed professor of Discovery in Chemistry at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Switzer received his BS degree in chemistry from the University of Cincinnati, and his PhD degree in inorganic chemistry from Wayne State University under Professor John F. Endicott. After receiving his PhD degree, he joined Union Oil Company of California as a senior research chemist. His research at UNOCAL was on photoelectrochemistry and the electrochemical processing of photovoltaic cells.
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Kurt Heinrich Meyer
1883 - 1952 (69 years)
Kurt Heinrich Meyer or Kurt Otto Hans Meyer was a German chemist. Life and work Born in Tartu, Estonia, Meyer was the son of the pharmacologist Hans Horst Meyer. He was a student from 1892 until 1901 in the “Gymnasium Philippinum” in Marburg, Germany. This was followed at first by studies in medicine, later in chemistry in Marburg , and in Leipzig, Freiburg, London, and Munich. In Leipzig, Meyer obtained his PhD in 1907 with the dissertation “Untersuchungen über Halochromie” under the direction of Arthur Hantzsch. Afterwards, following the advice of his father, he travelled to England to complement his education and worked for several months in the laboratory of Ernest Rutherford.
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Harrison Brown
1917 - 1986 (69 years)
Harrison Scott Brown was an American nuclear chemist and geochemist. He was a political activist, who lectured and wrote on the issues of arms limitation, natural resources and world hunger. During World War II, Brown worked at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and Clinton Engineer Works, where he worked on ways to separate plutonium from uranium. The techniques he helped develop were used at the Hanford Site to produce the plutonium used in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. After the war he lectured on the dangers of nuclear weapons.
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Conrad Weygand
1890 - 1945 (55 years)
Conrad Weygand was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Leipzig. In 1938 he put forward a method for the classification of chemical reactions based on bond breakage and formation during the reaction. The preparative part of his book, Organisch-Chemische Experimentierkunst, was translated into English and published as Organic Preparations by Interscience Publishers, Inc. in 1946. His book about German chemistry introduces similar thoughts like there were presented by Philipp Lenard in his Deutsche Physik movement.
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Dudley Maurice Newitt
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
Dudley Maurice Newitt FRS was a British chemical engineer who was awarded the Rumford Medal in 1962 in recognition of his 'distinguished contributions to chemical engineering'. Newitt was born in London and started working as an assistant chemist for Nobel in Scotland. In the First World War, he served in the East Surrey Regiment and was awarded the Military Cross.
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Gerhard Krohn Rollefson
1900 - 1955 (55 years)
Gerhard Krohn Rollefson was a professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Background and career Rollefson received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His dissertation concerned Ebullioscopic constant measurement of mixed liquid media. He then completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Rollefson was a specialist in physical chemistry and studied the impact of X-ray radiation on a variety of materials. Rollefson published a book with Milton Burton in 1939: Photochemist...
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E. J. Bowen
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Edmund John Bowen FRS was a British physical chemist. Early life and wartime career E. J. Bowen was the eldest of four born to Edmund Riley Bowen and Lilias Bowen in 1898 in Worcester, England. He attended the Royal Grammar School Worcester.
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Arlie W. Schorger
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Arlie William Schorger was a chemical researcher and businessman who also did work in ornithology. His chemistry work of note largely involved wood and waterproofing. His only chemistry book was The chemistry of cellulose and wood, but he had 34 patents.
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William Houlder Zachariasen
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
William Houlder Zachariasen , more often known as W. H. Zachariasen, was a Norwegian-American physicist, specializing in X-ray crystallography and famous for his work on the structure of glass. Background Zachariasen was born in Langesund at Bamble in Telemark, Norway. He entered the University of Oslo in 1923, where he studied in the Mineralogical Institute. Zachariasen published his first article in 1925 when he was 19 years old, after having presented the contents of the article to the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in the preceding year. Over a span of 55 years he published over 200 scientific papers, many of which he was the sole author.
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William Giauque
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
William Francis Giauque was a Canadian-born American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized in 1949 for his studies in the properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero. He spent virtually all of his educational and professional career at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Joseph Edward Mayer
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Joseph Edward Mayer was a chemist who formulated the Mayer expansion in statistical field theory. He was professor of chemistry at the University of California San Diego from 1960 to 1972, and previously at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He was married to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer from 1930 until her death in 1972. He went to work with James Franck in Göttingen, Germany in 1929, where he met Maria, a student of Max Born. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and the American Philosophical Society .
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James B. Sumner
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
James Batcheller Sumner was an American biochemist. He discovered that enzymes can be crystallized, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 with John Howard Northrop and Wendell Meredith Stanley. He was also the first to prove that enzymes are proteins.
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Hugh Stott Taylor
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Sir Hugh Stott Taylor was an English chemist primarily interested in catalysis. In 1925, in a landmark contribution to catalytic theory, Taylor suggested that a catalysed chemical reaction is not catalysed over the entire solid surface of the catalyst but only at certain 'active sites' or centres. He also developed important methods for procuring heavy water during World War II and pioneered the use of stable isotopes in studying chemical reactions.
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James William McBain
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
James William McBain FRS was a Canadiann chemist. He gained a Master of Arts at Toronto University and a Doctor of Science at Heidelberg University. He carried out pioneering work in the area of micelles at the University of Bristol. As early as 1913 he postulated the existence of "colloidal ions", now known as micelles, to explain the good electrolytic conductivity of sodium palmitate solutions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 1923 He won their Davy Medal in 1939.
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Otto Redlich
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Otto Redlich was an Austrian physical chemist who is best known for his development of equations of state like Redlich-Kwong equation. Besides this he had numerous other contributions to science. He won the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1932.
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Hans Erlenmeyer
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Hans Friedrich Albrecht Erlenmeyer was a German-Swiss chemist and collector of antiquities. He was a professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Basel. Life and career Hans Erlenmeyer came from a family of chemists; his grandfather Emil Erlenmeyer and his father Emil Erlenmeyer Jr. were both chemistry professors. Erlenmeyer studied chemistry from 1918 to 1922 at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1922 with a thesis entitled "On Asymmetric Synthesis". He worked as an assistant to Bernhard Lepsius. In 192...
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Harold Hartley
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Brigadier-General Sir Harold Brewer Hartley was a British physical chemist. He moved from academia to important positions in business and industry, including serving as Chairman of the British Overseas Airways Corporation.
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Philip J. Elving
1913 - 1984 (71 years)
Philip Juliber Elving was a chemist who served on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and most notably the University of Michigan, where he was the Hobart Willard Professor of Chemistry. He retired from Michigan, assuming professor emeritus status, in 1983. His research was primarily in analytical chemistry, a subject he also taught for many years at Michigan. Along with I. M. Kolthoff and J. D. Winefordner, he co-edited two popular series of monographs on analytical chemistry.
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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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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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Herbert Newby McCoy
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Herbert Newby McCoy was an American chemist who taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah and was the vice-president of Lindsay Light & Chemical Company. He contributed numerous papers on physical chemistry, radioactivity and rare earths.
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Herman Francis Mark
1895 - 1992 (97 years)
Herman Francis Mark was an Austrian-American chemist regarded for his contributions to the development of polymer science. Mark's x-ray diffraction work on the molecular structure of fibers provided important evidence for the macromolecular theory of polymer structure. Together with Houwink he formulated an equation, now called the Mark–Houwink or Mark–Houwink–Sakurada equation, describing the dependence of the intrinsic viscosity of a polymer on its relative molecular mass . He was a long-time faculty at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. In 1946, he established the Journal of Polymer Scie...
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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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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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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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Tadeusz Reichstein
1897 - 1996 (99 years)
Tadeusz Reichstein , also known as Tadeus Reichstein, was a Polish-Swiss chemist and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate , which was awarded for his work on the isolation of cortisone.
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Kazimierz Fajans
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Kazimierz Fajans was a Polish American physical chemist of Polish-Jewish origin, a pioneer in the science of radioactivity and the co-discoverer of chemical element protactinium. Education and career He was born May 27, 1887, in Warsaw, Congress Poland, to a family of Jewish background. After he had completed secondary school in Warsaw , he started studying chemistry in Germany, at first at the University in Leipzig, and then in Heidelberg and Zürich. In 1909 he was awarded a PhD degree for his research into the stereoselective synthesis of chiral compounds.
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Pauline Gracia Beery Mack
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Pauline Gracia Beery Mack was an American chemist, home economist, and college administrator. Her research in calcium, nutrition, radiation, and bone density began during the 1930s, and culminated in work for NASA when she was in her seventies.
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Harold Ellingham
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Harold Johann Thomas Ellingham, OBE, was a British physical chemist, best known for his Ellingham diagrams, which summarize a large amount of information concerning extractive metallurgy. Ellingham was born in Tottenham on 21 November 1897, the son of Thomas Robert Ellingham and Katherine Caroline Bauer.
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William Gidley Emmett
1887 - 1985 (98 years)
William Gidley Emmett FRSE was a British industrial chemist, educationalist and academic author. In education he spoke out against traditional examination methods and developed a series of non-standard tests to assess IQ, now commonly appearing in standard IQ tests, and generally known as the Moray House Tests.
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William P. Murphy
1892 - 1987 (95 years)
William Parry Murphy was an American physician who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George Richards Minot and George Hoyt Whipple for their combined work in devising and treating macrocytic anemia .
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Arne Ölander
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Gustav Arne Ölander was a Swedish chemist, known for his discovery of the shape-memory effect in metal alloys. He was the son of Gustaf Ölander and Hilda Ölander née Norrman. Ölander became an associate professor of physical chemistry at Stockholm University in 1929. He was a professor of theoretical chemistry and electrochemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology 1936–1943, in inorganic and physical chemistry at Stockholm University 1943–1960, and in physical chemistry at Stockholm University 1960–1968.
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Paul Karrer
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Professor Paul Karrer FRS FRSE FCS was a Swiss organic chemist best known for his research on vitamins. He and Norman Haworth won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1937. Biography Early years Karrer was born in Moscow, Russia to Paul Karrer and Julie Lerch, both Swiss nationals. In 1892 Karrer's family returned to Switzerland where he was educated at Wildegg and at the grammar school in Lenzburg, Aarau, where he matriculated in 1908. He studied chemistry at the University of Zurich under Alfred Werner and after gaining his Ph.D. in 1911, he spent a further year as assistant in the Chemical Institute.
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Gordon Aylward
1900 - Present (126 years)
Gordon Hillis Aylward is an Australian chemical author. He is known for writing the SI Chemical Data book. Biography Aylward graduated on 20 May 1952 with a BSc in Applied Chemistry from the then-new University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Later he received a MSc from the same university, and continued to teach Analytical Chemistry for 13 years there. During that period he organized the Approach to Chemistry summer schools, together with his co-teacher dr Tristan Findlay. To support the course, they wrote the book SI Chemical Data as the textbook.
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Frederick Mason Brewer
1903 - 1963 (60 years)
Frederick Mason Brewer CBE FRIC was an English chemist. He was Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford and Mayor of Oxford during 1959–60. Frederick Brewer was born in Kensal Rise , Middlesex, England. He was the son of Frederick Charles Brewer and Ellen Maria Owen, both school teachers. Brewer studied chemistry at Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1920, having received an open scholarship, and subsequently gained a first class degree. After his undergraduate studies, Brewer undertook research with Prof. Frederick Soddy.
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Hans Stammreich
1902 - 1969 (67 years)
Hans Stammreich , was a Brazilian chemist of German origin and an important pioneer of Raman spectroscopy and molecular spectroscopy. Life After obtaining his PhD in physical chemistry after studying under Adolf Miethe at the Berlin Technical University, Stammreich became soon, partly influenced by his personal friendship with Albert Einstein, interested in molecular spectroscopy, especially Raman spectroscopy. After he was fired from TU Berlin in April 1933 because of his Jewish background, Stammreich emigrated to Paris, where he stayed until 1940, working in the labs of Paul Langevin and Ch...
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Emil Votoček
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Emil Votoček was a Czech chemist, composer and music theorist. He is noted for his chemistry textbooks and multilingual dictionaries in both chemistry and music. Chemistry career Votoček studied at the Czech Institute of Technology later in Mulhouse and received his PhD with Bernhard Tollens at the University of Göttingen for his chemistry of sugar.
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