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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#7201
Edward W. Morley
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
Edward Williams Morley was an American scientist known for his precise and accurate measurement of the atomic weight of oxygen, and for the Michelson–Morley experiment. Biography Morley was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Anna Clarissa Treat and the Reverend Sardis Brewster Morley. Both parents were of early colonial ancestry and of purely British origin. He grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. During his childhood, he suffered much from ill health and was therefore educated by his father at home until the age of nineteen.
Go to Profile#7202
Norman Haworth
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Sir Walter Norman Haworth FRS was a British chemist best known for his groundbreaking work on ascorbic acid while working at the University of Birmingham. He received the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations on carbohydrates and vitamin C". The prize was shared with Swiss chemist Paul Karrer for his work on other vitamins.
Go to Profile#7203
Kurt Alder
1902 - 1958 (56 years)
Kurt Alder was a German chemist and Nobel laureate. Biography Alder was born in the industrial area of Königshütte, Silesia , where he received his early schooling. Alder left the area when Königshütte became part of Poland in 1922. He studied chemistry at the University of Berlin from 1922, and later at the University of Kiel where his PhD was awarded in 1926 for work supervised by Otto Paul Hermann Diels.
Go to Profile#7204
Friedrich Bergius
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Friedrich Karl Rudolf Bergius was a German chemist known for the Bergius process for producing synthetic fuel from coal, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of contributions to the invention and development of chemical high-pressure methods. Having worked with IG Farben during World War II, his citizenship came into question following the war, causing him to ultimately flee to Argentina, where he acted as adviser to the Ministry of Industry.
Go to Profile#7205
Eugen Baumann
1846 - 1896 (50 years)
Eugen Baumann was a German chemist. He was one of the first people to create polyvinyl chloride , and, together with Carl Schotten, he discovered the Schotten-Baumann reaction. Life Baumann was born in Cannstatt, which is now part of Stuttgart. After he attended a gymnasium in Stuttgart, he was educated in the pharmacy of his father. During his time in Stuttgart, he attended the lectures of Hermann von Fehling at the University of Stuttgart.
Go to Profile#7206
Ludwig Gattermann
1860 - 1920 (60 years)
Ludwig Gattermann was a German chemist who contributed significantly to both organic and inorganic chemistry. Early life Ludwig Gatterman was born on 20 April 1860 in Goslar, an old mining town north of the Harz mountains. Two of his three siblings died at a young age.
Go to Profile#7207
Alexander Frumkin
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Alexander Naumovich Frumkin was a Russian/Soviet electrochemist, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1932, founder of the Russian Journal of Electrochemistry Elektrokhimiya and receiver of the Hero of Socialist Labor award. The Russian Academy of Sciences' A.N. Frumkin Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry is named after him.
Go to Profile#7208
Ernst David Bergmann
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Ernst David Bergmann was an Israeli nuclear scientist and chemist. He is often considered the father of the Israeli nuclear program. Biography Ernst David Bergmann was born in Germany, His father, Judah Bergmann, was a rabbi. He studied chemistry at the University of Berlin under Wilhelm Schlenk. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1927. Bergmann continued to work at the university and wrote the "Comprehensive Manual of Organic Chemistry" together with Schlenk. The two-volume manual was published in 1932 and 1939, respectively; however, because Bergmann was Jewish his name to be removed from the tit...
Go to Profile#7209
Fritz Pregl
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Fritz Pregl , was a Slovenian-Austrian chemist and physician from a mixed Slovene-German-speaking background. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1923 for making important contributions to quantitative organic microanalysis, one of which was the improvement of the combustion train technique for elemental analysis.
Go to Profile#7210
Hans Theodor Bucherer
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Hans Theodor Bucherer was a German chemist and gave name to several chemical reactions, for example the Bucherer carbazole synthesis, the Bucherer reaction, and the Bucherer–Bergs reaction Life Bucherer started studying chemistry at the University of Munich, University of Karlsruhe and later with Johannes Wislicenus at the University of Leipzig. After he received his Ph.D in 1893 he worked at BASF. He became professor at Technical University of Dresden in 1901 changed to the Technical University of Berlin in 1913 and became professor at the Technical University of Munich in 1926.
Go to Profile#7211
Max Bodenstein
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Max Ernst August Bodenstein was a German physical chemist known for his work in chemical kinetics. He was first to postulate a chain reaction mechanism and that explosions are branched chain reactions, later applied to the atomic bomb.
Go to Profile#7212
Paul Sabatier
1854 - 1941 (87 years)
Prof Paul Sabatier FRS HFRSE was a French chemist, born in Carcassonne. In 1912, Sabatier was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Victor Grignard. Sabatier was honoured for his work improving the hydrogenation of organic species in the presence of metals.
Go to Profile#7213
Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig was a German chemist. He discovered the pinacol coupling reaction, mesitylene, diacetyl and biphenyl. Fittig studied the action of sodium on ketones and hydrocarbons. He discovered the Fittig reaction or Wurtz–Fittig reaction for the synthesis of alkylbenzenes, he proposed a diketone structure for benzoquinone and isolated phenanthrene from coal tar. He discovered and synthesized the first lactones and investigated structures of piperine, naphthalene, and fluorene.
Go to Profile#7214
Auguste Laurent
1807 - 1853 (46 years)
Auguste Laurent was a French chemist who helped in the founding of organic chemistry with his discoveries of anthracene, phthalic acid, and carbolic acid. He devised a systematic nomenclature for organic chemistry based on structural grouping of atoms within molecules to determine how the molecules combine in organic reactions. He studied under Jean-Baptiste Dumas as a laboratory assistant and worked with Charles Frédéric Gerhardt. He died in Paris from tuberculosis.
Go to Profile#7215
William Hyde Wollaston
1766 - 1828 (62 years)
William Hyde Wollaston was an English chemist and physicist who is famous for discovering the chemical elements palladium and rhodium. He also developed a way to process platinum ore into malleable ingots.
Go to Profile#7216
Theodore William Richards
1868 - 1928 (60 years)
Theodore William Richards was the first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements."
Go to Profile#7217
Arthur C. Cope
1909 - 1966 (57 years)
Arthur C. Cope was an American organic chemist and member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He is credited with the development of several important chemical reactions which bear his name including the Cope elimination and the Cope rearrangement.
Go to Profile#7218
Kikunae Ikeda
1864 - 1936 (72 years)
Kikunae Ikeda was a Japanese chemist and Tokyo Imperial University professor of chemistry who, in 1908, uncovered the chemical basis of a taste he named umami. It is one of the five basic tastes along with sweet, bitter, sour and salty.
Go to Profile#7219
Johannes Wislicenus
1835 - 1902 (67 years)
Johannes Wislicenus was a German chemist, most famous for his work in early stereochemistry. Biography The son of the radical Protestant theologian Gustav Wislicenus, Johannes was born on 24 June 1835 in Kleineichstedt in Prussian Saxony, and entered University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1853. In October 1853 he immigrated to the United States with his family. For a brief time he acted as assistant to Harvard chemist Eben Horsford, and in 1855 was appointed lecturer at the Mechanics' Institute in New York. Returning to Europe in 1856, he continued to study chemistry with Wilhelm Heinrich Heintz at the University of Halle.
Go to Profile#7220
Gerhart Jander
1892 - 1961 (69 years)
Gerhart Jander was a German inorganic chemist. His book, now normally only called "Jander-Blasius", on analytical chemistry is still used in German universities. His involvement in the chemical weapon research and close relation to the NSDAP have been uncovered by recent research.
Go to Profile#7221
Meredith Gwynne Evans
1904 - 1952 (48 years)
Meredith Gwynne Evans, FRS was a British physical chemist, who made important theoretical contributions in the study of chemical reaction rates and reaction mechanisms. Together with Henry Eyring and Michael Polanyi, Meredith Gwynne Evans is one of the founders of the transition state theory.
Go to Profile#7222
Georg Ernst Stahl
1659 - 1734 (75 years)
Georg Ernst Stahl was a German chemist, physician and philosopher. He was a supporter of vitalism, and until the late 18th century his works on phlogiston were accepted as an explanation for chemical processes.
Go to Profile#7223
Emil Erlenmeyer
1825 - 1909 (84 years)
Richard August Carl Emil Erlenmeyer , known simply as Emil Erlenmeyer, was a German chemist known for contributing to the early development of the theory of structure, formulating the Erlenmeyer rule, and designing the Erlenmeyer flask, a type of specialized flask, ubiquitous in chemistry laboratories, which is named after him.
Go to Profile#7224
Max Volmer
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Max Volmer was a German physical chemist, who made important contributions in electrochemistry, in particular on electrode kinetics. He co-developed the Butler–Volmer equation. Volmer held the chair and directorship of the Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry Institute of the Technische Hochschule Berlin, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After World War II, he went to the Soviet Union, where he headed a design bureau for the production of heavy water. Upon his return to East Germany ten years later, he became a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin and was president of the East German ...
Go to Profile#7225
Andrés Manuel del Río
1764 - 1849 (85 years)
Andrés Manuel del Río y Fernández was a Spanish scientist, naturalist and engineer, nationalized Mexican, who discovered compounds of vanadium in 1801. He proposed that the element be given the name panchromium, or later, erythronium, but his discovery was not credited at the time, and his names were not used.
Go to Profile#7226
Walter Reppe
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Walter Julius Reppe was a German chemist. He is notable for his contributions to the chemistry of acetylene. Education and career Walter Reppe began his study of the natural sciences University of Jena in 1911. Interrupted by the First World War, he obtained his doctorate in Munich in 1920.
Go to Profile#7227
Adolph Strecker
1822 - 1871 (49 years)
Adolph Strecker was a German chemist who is remembered primarily for his work with amino acids. Life and work Strecker was born in Darmstadt, the son of Friedrich Ludwig Strecker, an archivist working for the hessian Grand Duke, and Henriette Amalie Johannette Koch. Adolph Strecker attended school in Darmstadt until 1838 when he changed to the higher Gewerbeschule. After receiving his abitur in 1840, Strecker began studying science at the University of Giessen, where Justus Liebig was a professor. In August 1842, Strecker received his PhD and began teaching at a realschule in Darmstadt. He re...
Go to Profile#7228
Martin Heinrich Klaproth
1743 - 1817 (74 years)
Martin Heinrich Klaproth was a German chemist. He trained and worked for much of his life as an apothecary, moving in later life to the university. His shop became the second-largest apothecary in Berlin, and the most productive artisanal chemical research center in Europe.
Go to Profile#7229
Warren K. Lewis
1882 - 1975 (93 years)
Warren Kendall Lewis was an MIT professor who has been called the father of modern chemical engineering. He co-authored an early major textbook on the subject which essentially introduced the concept of unit operations. He also co-developed the Houdry process under contract to The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey into modern fluid catalytic cracking with Edwin R. Gilliland, another MIT professor.
Go to Profile#7230
Jan Baptist van Helmont
1577 - 1644 (67 years)
Jan Baptist van Helmont was a chemist, physiologist, and physician from Brussels. He worked during the years just after Paracelsus and the rise of iatrochemistry, and is sometimes considered to be "the founder of pneumatic chemistry". Van Helmont is remembered today largely for his 5-year willow tree experiment, his introduction of the word "gas" into the vocabulary of science, and his ideas on spontaneous generation.
Go to Profile#7231
Angelo Angeli
1864 - 1931 (67 years)
Angelo Angeli was an Italian chemist. Angeli's salt and the Angeli–Rimini reaction are named after him. Scientific career Angeli studied in Padua, where he met the chemist Giacomo Luigi Ciamician. When Ciamician moved to a new appointment in Bologna, he chose Angeli to work as his assistant, even before Angeli had graduated. In 1891, Angeli was awarded his doctorate in chemistry at Bologna. In 1893, he became a lecturer in Bologna, and in 1895 he became a professor. In 1894, he worked briefly in Munich with Adolf von Baeyer, learning medicinal chemistry. In 1897, he moved to the University of...
Go to Profile#7232
Lars Fredrik Nilson
1840 - 1899 (59 years)
Lars Fredrik Nilson was a Swedish chemist, professor at Uppsala University, and later Director of the Agricultural Chemical Experiment Station at the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry in Stockholm.
Go to Profile#7233
Harmon Northrop Morse
1848 - 1920 (72 years)
Harmon Northrop Morse was an American chemist. Today he is known as the first to have synthesized paracetamol, but this substance only became widely used as a drug decades after Morse's death. In the first half of the 20th century he was best known for his study of osmotic pressure, for which he was awarded the Avogadro Medal in 1916. The Morse equation for estimating osmotic pressure is named after him.
Go to Profile#7234
Joseph Joshua Weiss
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Joseph Joshua Weiss was a Jewish-Austrian chemist and Professor at the Newcastle University. He was a pioneer in the field of radiation chemistry and photochemistry. Education and career Weiss was born in 1905 in Austria. He had obtained a Dipl.Ing. degree in the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. He entered the Textile Institute at Sorau in 1928 and was the head of the chemistry department there. He left his post two years later to become an assistant to the German chemist Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Elektrochemistry in Berlin. Together they discovered the Haber–Weiss reaction.
Go to Profile#7235
Lev Pisarzhevsky
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Lev Vladimirovich Pisarzhevsky was a Ukrainian Soviet chemist who studied peroxides, peracids, and solutionss. His contribution to the theory of catalysis is best known for his attempt to relate the catalytic properties of solids to their electronic properties.
Go to Profile#7236
Eugen Bamberger
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Eugen Bamberger was a German chemist and discoverer of the Bamberger rearrangement. Life and achievements Bamberger started studying medicine in 1875 at the University of Berlin, but changed subjects and university after one year, starting his studies of science at the University of Heidelberg in 1876. He returned to Berlin in the same year and focused on chemistry. He received his PhD for work with August Wilhelm von Hofmann in Berlin and became assistant of Karl Friedrich August Rammelsberg at Charlottenburg and in 1883 of Adolf von Baeyer at the University of Munich, where, after his hab...
Go to Profile#7237
Albin Haller
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Albin Haller was a French chemist. Haller founded the École Nationale Supérieure des Industries Chimiques in Nancy and in 1917 won the Davy Medal of the Royal Society "On the ground of his important researches in the domain of organic chemistry". Appointed to the French Academy of Sciences in 1900, he served as its president beginning in 1923. He was also a member of the French Académie Nationale de Médecine.
Go to Profile#7238
Lev Chugaev
1873 - 1922 (49 years)
Lev Aleksandrovich Chugaev was a chemist from the Russian Empire. At the height of his career, he was professor of chemistry at the University of Petersburg, being the successor to Dmitri Mendeleev. He was active in the fields of inorganic chemistry, especially platinum group complexes, as well as organic chemistry. He is also known as Leo Aleksandrovich Tschugaeff or Tschugaev.
Go to Profile#7239
Adolf Windaus
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus was a German chemist who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1928 for his work on sterols and their relation to vitamins. He was the doctoral advisor of Adolf Butenandt who also won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1939.
Go to Profile#7240
Germain Henri Hess
1802 - 1850 (48 years)
Germain Henri Hess was a Swiss-Russian chemist and doctor who formulated Hess's law, an early principle of thermochemistry. Early life and education Hess was born on 7 August 1802 in Geneva, Switzerland. His father was an artist and in 1805 moved the family to Russia to work as a tutor to a rich family. His Swiss-born mother was a tutor as well and Hess had the benefit of learning German and French at home. In 1817, his family moved to Dorpat, Russian Empire , where he went to a private school for two years, and then to Dorpat Gymnasium, which he finished in 1822. In autumn of the same year Hess studied medicine at the University of Dorpat.
Go to Profile#7241
Edward Calvin Kendall
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Edward Calvin Kendall was an American chemist. In 1950, Kendall was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine along with Swiss chemist Tadeusz Reichstein and Mayo Clinic physician Philip S. Hench, for their work with the hormones of the adrenal gland. Kendall did not only focus on the adrenal glands, he was also responsible for the isolation of thyroxine, a hormone of the thyroid gland and worked with the team that crystallized glutathione and identified its chemical structure.
Go to Profile#7242
Morris Travers
1872 - 1961 (89 years)
Morris William Travers, FRS was an English chemist who worked with Sir William Ramsay in the discovery of xenon, neon and krypton. His work on several of the rare gases earned him the name Rare Gas Travers in scientific circles. He was the founding director of the Indian Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#7243
Ludwig Wolff
1857 - 1919 (62 years)
Ludwig Wolff , born in Neustadt in Palatinate, was a German chemist. He studied chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he received his Ph.D. from Rudolph Fittig in 1882. He became Professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Jena in 1891 and held this position till his death in 1919. In 1911 he published a new reaction now known as the Wolff-Kishner reduction. His name is also associated with the chemical reaction known as the Wolff rearrangement .
Go to Profile#7244
Thomas Graham
1805 - 1869 (64 years)
Thomas Graham was a Scottish chemist known for his pioneering work in dialysis and the diffusion of gases. He is regarded as one of the founders of colloid chemistry. Life Graham was born in Glasgow,Scotland and was educated at the High School of Glasgow. Graham's father was a successful textile manufacturer, and wanted his son to enter into the Church of Scotland. Instead, defying his father's wishes, Graham became a student at the University of Glasgow in 1819. There he developed a strong interest in chemistry, studying under Professor Thomas Thomson, who was impressed and influenced by the young man.
Go to Profile#7245
Siegmund Gabriel
1851 - 1924 (73 years)
Siegmund Gabriel was a German chemist. Scientific career Siegmund Gabriel began studying chemistry at the University of Berlin in 1871. He continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg in 1872 with Professor Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1874, he received his doctorate and then returned to Berlin. He began teaching as an assistant, initially in the inorganic chemistry department, before becoming an associate professor in 1886. Gabriel later turned to organic chemistry in his own research.
Go to Profile#7246
Peter Waage
1833 - 1900 (67 years)
Peter Waage was a Norwegian chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Kristiania. Along with his brother-in-law Cato Maximilian Guldberg, he co-discovered and developed the law of mass action between 1864 and 1879.
Go to Profile#7247
Moses Gomberg
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Moses Gomberg was a chemistry professor at the University of Michigan. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and served as president of the American Chemical Society.
Go to Profile#7248
Ludwig Knorr
1859 - 1921 (62 years)
Ludwig Knorr was a German chemist. Together with Carl Paal, he discovered the Paal–Knorr synthesis, and the Knorr quinoline synthesis and Knorr pyrrole synthesis are also named after him. The synthesis in 1883 of the analgesic drug antipyrine, now called phenazone, was a commercial success. Antipyrine was the first synthetic drug and the most widely used drug until it was replaced by Aspirin in the early 20th century.
Go to Profile#7249
Hermann Irving Schlesinger
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Hermann Irving Schlesinger was an American inorganic chemist, working in boron chemistry. He and Herbert C. Brown discovered sodium borohydride in 1940 and both were involved in the further development of borohydride chemistry.
Go to Profile#7250
Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner
1783 - 1857 (74 years)
Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner was a German chemist, natural scientist and a professor of physics and chemistry. Biography Kastner received his doctorate in 1805 under the guidance of Johann Göttling and began lecturing at the University of Jena. He moved on to become professor at the University of Halle in 1812. In 1818 he relocated to the University of Bonn, where he would mentor famous chemist Justus Liebig. He then moved on to the University of Erlangen in the summer of 1821, where he would remain for the rest of his professional life.
Go to Profile