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).
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#7251
Ernst Cohen
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Ernst Julius Cohen ForMemRS was a Dutch Jewish chemist known for his work on the allotropy of metals. Cohen studied chemistry under Svante Arrhenius in Stockholm, Henri Moissan at Paris, and Jacobus van't Hoff at Amsterdam. In 1893 he became Van't Hoff's assistant and in 1902 he became professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Utrecht, a position which he held until his retirement in 1939. Throughout his life, Cohen studied the allotropy of tin. Cohen's areas of research included polymorphism of both elements and compounds, photographic chemistry, electrochemistry, pizeochemistry, and the history of science.
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Louis Joseph Troost
1825 - 1911 (86 years)
Louis Joseph Troost was a French chemist. Biography In 1848, he began his studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where from 1851 he worked as an assistant chemist. In 1856, he received his doctorate of sciences. After serving as chair of chemistry at the Lycée Bonaparte, he became a lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure . Beginning in 1874, he was a professor of chemistry to the faculty of sciences in Paris, and in 1884, replaced Charles Adolphe Wurtz as a member of the Académie des sciences.
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Sophia Getzowa
1872 - 1946 (74 years)
Sophia Getzowa was a Belarusian-born pathologist and scientist in Mandatory Palestine. She grew up in a Jewish shtetl in Belarus and during her medical studies at the University of Bern, she became engaged to Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel. Together they worked in the Zionist movement. After a four-year romance, Weizmann broke off their engagement and Getzowa returned to her medical studies, graduating in 1904. She carried out widely cited research on the thyroid, identifying solid cell nests in 1907.
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Astrid Cleve
1875 - 1968 (93 years)
Astrid Maria Cleve von Euler was a Swedish botanist, geologist, chemist and researcher at Uppsala University. She was the first woman in Sweden to obtain a doctoral degree of science. Life Astrid Maria Cleve was born into academic life on 22 January 1875, in Uppsala, Sweden. She was the eldest daughter of the chemist, oceanographer, geologist and professor Per Teodor Cleve and author Carolina Alma "Caralma" Öhbom . Her younger sisters were Agnes Cleve-Jonand , a visual artist and pioneer of Modernism in Sweden and Célie Brunius , a journalist. They received their early education at home from ...
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Rudolf Signer
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Rudolf Signer contributed to the discovery of the DNA double helix. He was a Professor for organic chemistry at the University of Bern from 1935 until 1972. Education Signer was the son of Jakob Signer, a chemical scientist working in the textile industry, and his wife Dorothea Agnes Scherrer. Rudolf Signer went to high school in St. Gallen and matriculated at the ETH Zurich in 1921 to study chemistry, initially in order to become a teacher. 1927 he graduated with his doctorate under the supervision of Hermann Staudinger. Already 1926 he had become Wissenschaftlicher Assistent at the Univers...
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Karl Heinrich Ritthausen
1826 - 1912 (86 years)
Karl Heinrich Ritthausen was a German biochemist who identified two amino acids and made other contributions to the science of plant proteins. Education Ritthausen was born in Armenruh, near Goldburg, Silesia, Prussia, in today's Poland.
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Hugo Schiff
1834 - 1915 (81 years)
Hugo Schiff was an Italian naturalized chemist. The son of a Jewish businessman and brother of the physiologist Moritz Schiff, Hugo Schiff was German by nationality. He discovered Schiff bases and other imines, and was responsible for research into aldehydes; leading to his development of the Schiff test. He also worked in the field of amino acids and the Biuret reagent.
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Salimuzzaman Siddiqui
1897 - 1994 (97 years)
Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, was a Pakistani Muhajir organic chemist specialising in natural products, and a professor of chemistry at the University of Karachi. Siddiqui studied philosophy at Aligarh Muslim University and later studied chemistry at Frankfurt University, where he received his PhD in 1927. On return to British India, he worked at the Tibbia College Delhi and the Indian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. He later moved to Pakistan and worked in the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. He went on to establish the Pakistan National Science Council and was appointed its first chairman in 1961.
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Guido Bodländer
1855 - 1904 (49 years)
Guido Bodländer was a German chemist. After graduating from the University of Breslau in 1882, he became an assistant to Moritz Traube in his laboratory at Breslau. Afterwards, he served as a pharmacology assistant in Bonn and later worked at the mineralogical institute in Clausthal . From 1897 to 1899 he worked at the institute of physical chemistry in Göttingen, and in 1899 became a professor of chemistry in Braunschweig. He was in line to succeed Walther Nernst as chair of physical chemistry at the University of Göttingen, however Bodländer died at the age of 49 prior to attaining the p...
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