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,
#101
George C. Schatz
#13202
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
George Chappell Schatz , the Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, is a theoretical chemist best known for his seminal contributions to the fields of reaction dynamics and nanotechnology.
Go to Profile#102
John M. Deutch
#2636
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
John Mark Deutch is an American physical chemist and civil servant. He was the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1995 and Director of Central Intelligence from May 10, 1995, until December 15, 1996. He is an emeritus Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the boards of directors of Citigroup, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd. Deutch is also a member of the Trilateral Commission.
Go to Profile#103
Koji Nakanishi
#7782
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
was a Japanese chemist who studied bioorganic chemistry and natural products. He served as Centennial Professor of Chemistry and chair of the Chemistry Department at Columbia University. Early life Nakanishi was born in Hong Kong on May 11, 1925. He first attended the British Boys' School in Alexandria, Egypt. Once he turned 10 his family and he moved back to Japan, where he would attend Yamate primary for a year before transferring over to the junior division of Konan High school. He first applied to Tokyo University only to be rejected, after which he applied and was accepted to Nagoya University.
Go to Profile#104
Paul Lauterbur
#1322
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Paul Christian Lauterbur was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging possible.
Go to Profile#105
Dudley R. Herschbach
#4328
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Dudley Robert Herschbach is an American chemist at Harvard University. He won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi "for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes". Herschbach and Lee specifically worked with molecular beams, performing crossed molecular beam experiments that enabled a detailed molecular-level understanding of many elementary reaction processes. Herschbach is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Go to Profile#106
Hisashi Yamamoto
#12221
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Hisashi Yamamoto is a prominent organic chemist and currently a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago and professor of Chubu University. Life Born in Kobe, Japan, Yamamoto earned a B.S. at Kyoto University in 1967 and a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1971.
Go to Profile#107
Richard Bader
#9611
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Richard F. W. Bader was a Canadian quantum chemist, noted for his work on the Atoms in molecules theory. This theory attempts to establish a physical basis for many of the working concepts of chemistry, such as atoms in molecules and bonding, in terms of the topology of the electron density function in three-dimensional space. Alongside the eminent chemist Ronald Gillespie, he had a significant influence on inorganic chemistry education in Canada.
Go to Profile#108
James Lovelock
#321
Overall Influence
1919 - 2022 (103 years)
James Ephraim Lovelock was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
Go to Profile#109
John F. Hartwig
#16186
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
John F. Hartwig is an American organometallic chemist who holds the position of Henry Rapoport Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. His laboratory traditionally focuses on developing transition metal-catalyzed reactions. Hartwig is known for helping develop the Buchwald–Hartwig amination, a chemical reaction used in organic chemistry for the synthesis of carbon–nitrogen bonds via the palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling of amines with aryl halides.
Go to Profile#110
Leslie Orgel
#1403
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Leslie Eleazer Orgel FRS was a British chemist. He is known for his theories on the origin of life. Biography Leslie Orgel was born in London, England, on . He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry with first-class honours from the University of Oxford in 1948. In 1951 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and in 1953 was awarded his PhD in chemistry.
Go to Profile#111
Stephen J. Lippard
#11909
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Stephen James Lippard is the Arthur Amos Noyes Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is considered one of the founders of bioinorganic chemistry, studying the interactions of nonliving substances such as metals with biological systems. He is also considered a founder of metalloneurochemistry, the study of metal ions and their effects in the brain and nervous system. He has done pioneering work in understanding protein structure and synthesis, the enzymatic functions of methane monooxygenase , and the mechanisms of cisplatin anticancer drugs. His w...
Go to Profile#112
Martin Kamen
#4260
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Martin David Kamen was an American chemist who, together with Sam Ruben, co-discovered the synthesis of the isotope carbon-14 on February 27, 1940, at the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley. He also confirmed that all of the oxygen released in photosynthesis comes from water, not carbon dioxide, in 1941.
Go to Profile#113
William Standish Knowles
#6335
Overall Influence
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
William Standish Knowles was an American chemist. He was born in Taunton, Massachusetts. Knowles was one of the recipients of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He split half the prize with Ryōji Noyori for their work in asymmetric synthesis, specifically for his work in hydrogenation reactions. The other half was awarded to K. Barry Sharpless for his work in oxidation reactions.
Go to Profile#114
William von Eggers Doering
#11708
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
William von Eggers Doering was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. Before Harvard, he taught at Columbia and Yale . Doering was born in Fort Worth, Texas to academics Carl Rupp Doering and Antoinette Mathilde von Eggers, both of whom were professors at Texas Christian University. His maternal great-uncle was the prominent German financier and economist Hjalmar Schacht, sometime President of the Reichsbank and cabinet minister in Nazi Germany.
Go to Profile#115
Martin Fleischmann
#4589
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Martin Fleischmann FRS was a British chemist who worked in electrochemistry. Premature announcement of his cold fusion research with Stanley Pons, regarding excess heat in heavy water, caused a media sensation and elicited skepticism and criticism from many in the scientific community.
Go to Profile#116
Leo Sternbach
#4648
Overall Influence
1908 - 2005 (97 years)
Leo Sternbach was a Polish American chemist who is credited with first synthesizing benzodiazepines, the main class of tranquilizers. Background and family Sternbach was born on May 7, 1908, in Opatija, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, to an upper middle class Jewish family. He had a younger brother, Giusi. His father Michael Abracham Sternbach was from the Polish city of Przemyśl in Galicia , and his mother Piroska Sternbach was from Orosháza, Hungary. Sternbach's parents met and married in Opatija where they both lived. The family lived in modest conditions, in a rented four-r...
Go to Profile#117
Charles David Keeling
#5564
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Charles David Keeling was an American scientist whose recording of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory confirmed Svante Arrhenius's proposition of the possibility of anthropogenic contribution to the greenhouse effect and global warming, by documenting the steadily rising carbon dioxide levels. The Keeling Curve measures the progressive buildup of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere.
Go to Profile#118
Stanley Miller
#3327
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Stanley Lloyd Miller was an American chemist who made important experiments concerning the origin of life by demonstrating that a wide range of vital organic compounds can be synthesized by fairly simple chemical processes from inorganic substances. In 1952 he performed the Miller–Urey experiment, which showed that complex organic molecules could be synthesised from inorganic precursors. The experiment was widely reported, and provided evidence for the idea that the chemical evolution of the early Earth had caused the natural synthesis of organic compounds from inanimate inorganic molecules.
Go to Profile#119
Hervé This
#4765
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Hervé This is a French physical chemist who works for the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique at AgroParisTech, in Paris, France. His main area of scientific research is molecular gastronomy, that is the science of culinary phenomena .
Go to Profile#120
Jerome Karle
#3451
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Jerome Karle was an American physical chemist. Jointly with Herbert A. Hauptman, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, for the direct analysis of crystal structures using X-ray scattering techniques.
Go to Profile#121
James Tour
#9097
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
#122
Ronald Gillespie
#8730
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Ronald James Gillespie, was a British chemist specializing in the field of molecular geometry, who arrived in Canada after accepting an offer that included his own laboratory with new equipment, which post-World War II Britain could not provide. He was responsible for establishing inorganic chemistry education in Canada.
Go to Profile#123
Reiko Kuroda
#17636
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
is a Japanese chemist who is a professor at the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Tokyo. Early life and education Kuroda was born in Akita but grew up in Miygai, on the island of Honshu, Japan. She obtained her MSc and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Tokyo. Her doctorate focused on determining the stereochemistry of metal complexes.
Go to Profile#124
William E. Moerner
#4930
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
William Esco Moerner, also known as W. E. Moerner, is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Go to Profile#125
M. Stanley Whittingham
#4504
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Michael Stanley Whittingham is a British-American chemist. He is a professor of chemistry and director of both the Institute for Materials Research and the Materials Science and Engineering program at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He also serves as director of the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage of the U.S. Department of Energy at Binghamton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 alongside Akira Yoshino and John B. Goodenough.
Go to Profile#126
William L. Jorgensen
#17464
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
William L. Jorgensen is a Sterling Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. He is considered a pioneer in the field of computational chemistry. Some of his contributions include the TIP3P, TIP4P, and TIP5P water models, the OPLS force field, and his work on free-energy perturbation theory for modeling reactions in solution, protein-ligand binding, and drug design; he has over 400 publications in the field. Jorgensen has been the Editor of the ACS Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation since its founding in 2005.
Go to Profile#127
Jean Fréchet
#9654
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jean M.J. Fréchet is a French-American chemist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his work on polymers including polymer-supported chemistry, chemically amplified photoresists, dendrimers, macroporous separation media, and polymers for therapeutics. Ranked among the top 10 chemists in 2021, he has authored nearly 900 scientific paper and 200 patents including 96 US patents. His research areas include organic synthesis and polymer chemistry applied to nanoscience and nanotechnology with emphasis on the design, fundamental understanding, syn...
Go to Profile#128
Samuel J. Danishefsky
#9308
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Samuel J. Danishefsky is an American chemist working as a professor at both Columbia University and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Birth and education Samuel J. Danishefsky was born in 1936 in the United States. He completed his B.S. from Yeshiva University in 1956. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1962 with Peter Yates, which partially overlapped with a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Gilbert Stork at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#129
Robert Byron Bird
#10552
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Robert Byron Bird was an American chemical engineer and professor emeritus in the department of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was known for his research in transport phenomena of non-Newtonian fluids, including fluid dynamics of polymers, polymer kinetic theory, and rheology. He, along with Warren E. Stewart and Edwin N. Lightfoot, was an author of the classic textbook Transport Phenomena. Bird was a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1987.
Go to Profile#130
Clayton Heathcock
#17729
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Clayton Heathcock is an organic chemist, professor of chemistry, and dean of the college of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Heathcock is well known for his accomplishments in the synthesis of complex polycyclic natural products and for his contributions to the chemistry community. In 1995 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#131
K. C. Nicolaou
#7573
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kyriacos Costa Nicolaou is a Cypriot-American chemist known for his research in the area of natural products total synthesis. He is currently Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Chemistry at Rice University, having previously held academic positions at The Scripps Research Institute/UC San Diego and the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#132
Michael Szwarc
#14755
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Michael Szwarc was a British and American polymer chemist who discovered and studied ionic living polymerization. Biography Michael Mojżesz Szwarc was born into a Polish-Jewish family in Będzin, Poland. In 1932 he received the title of engineer in chemistry at the Warsaw University of Technology. In 1935 he emigrated to Palestine, where he joined his sister and cousin. In 1942 he defended his first Ph.D. dissertation in organic chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#133
Tobin J. Marks
#12899
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#134
Gábor A. Somorjai
#16637
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Gabor A. Somorjai is a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a leading researcher in the field of surface chemistry and catalysis, especially the catalytic effects of metal surfaces on gas-phase reactions . For his contributions to the field, Somorjai won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1998, the Linus Pauling Award in 2000, the National Medal of Science in 2002, the Priestley Medal in 2008, the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Science and the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences in 2013. In April 2015, Somorjai was awarded the American Chemical Society's William H.
Go to Profile#135
Raphael Mechoulam
#4740
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Raphael Mechoulam was a Bulgarian-born Israeli organic chemist and a professor in the Department of Natural Materials at the School of Pharmacy in the Faculty of Medicine of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mechoulam served as Rector of the university from 1979-1982. He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1994 and served as its scientific chair from 2007-2013. He was a recipient of the Israel Prize for Chemistry Research in 2000 and the Harvey Prize for 2019-2020.
Go to Profile#136
John E. McMurry
#17786
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John E. McMurry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University. He received an A.B. from Harvard University in 1964 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1967 working with Gilbert Stork. Following completion of his Ph.D., he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1967 and moved to Cornell University in 1980.
Go to Profile#137
Harold Scheraga
#16367
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Harold Abraham Scheraga was an American biophysicist and the George W. and Grace L. Todd Professor Emeritus in the chemistry department at Cornell University. Scheraga is regarded as a pioneer in protein biophysics and has been especially influential in the study of protein solvation and the hydrophobic effect as it relates to protein folding.
Go to Profile#138
Richard Zare
#11605
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Richard Neil Zare is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. Throughout his career, Zare has made a considerable impact in physical chemistry and analytical chemistry, particularly through the development of laser-induced fluorescence and the study of chemical reactions at the molecular and nanoscale level. LIF is an extremely sensitive technique with applications ranging from analytical chemistry and molecular biology to astrophysics. One of its applications was the sequencing of the human genome.
Go to Profile#139
Phil S. Baran
#14220
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Phil S. Baran is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and Member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology. Baran has authored over 130 published scientific articles. He has several patents. His work is focused on synthesizing complex organic compounds, the development of new reactions, and the development of new reagents.
Go to Profile#140
Koichi Tanaka
#5445
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Koichi Tanaka is a Japanese electrical engineer who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for developing a novel method for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules with John Bennett Fenn and Kurt Wüthrich .
Go to Profile#141
John E. Walker
#2262
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sir John Ernest Walker is a British chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997. Walker is Emeritus Director and Professor at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#142
Mostafa El-Sayed
#10397
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Mostafa A. El-Sayed is an Egyptian-American physical chemist, a leading nanoscience researcher, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a US National Medal of Science laureate. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry during a critical period of growth. He is also known for the spectroscopy rule named after him, the El-Sayed rule.
Go to Profile#143
Archer Martin
#11518
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Archer John Porter Martin was a British chemist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of partition chromatography with Richard Synge. Early life Martin's father was a GP. Martin was educated at Bedford School, and Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#144
John D. Ferry
#18679
Overall Influence
1912 - 2002 (90 years)
John Douglass Ferry was a Canadian-born American chemist and biochemist noted for development of surgical products from blood plasma and for studies of the chemistry of large molecules. Along with Williams and Landel, Ferry co-authored the work on time-temperature superposition in which the now famous WLF equation first appeared. The National Academy of Sciences called Ferry "a towering figure in polymer science". The University of Wisconsin said that he was "undoubtedly the most widely recognized research pioneer in the study of motional dynamics in macromolecular systems by viscoelastic t...
Go to Profile#145
F. Sherwood Rowland
#5512
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Frank Sherwood "Sherry" Rowland was an American Nobel laureate and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. His research was on atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics. His best-known work was the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion.
Go to Profile#146
Peter Agre
#2611
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Peter Agre is an American physician, Nobel Laureate, and molecular biologist, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute. In 2003, Agre and Roderick MacKinnon shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes." Agre was recognized for his discovery of aquaporin water channels. Aquaporins are water-channel proteins that move water molecules through the cell membrane. In 2009, Agre was elected president of ...
Go to Profile#147
Peter J. Stang
#16737
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Peter John Stang is a German American chemist and Distinguished Professor of chemistry at the University of Utah. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Chemical Society from 2002 to 2020.
Go to Profile#148
Makoto Kumada
#16944
Overall Influence
1920 - 2007 (87 years)
Makoto Kumada was a Japanese chemist and was a Professor of Chemistry first at Osaka City University until his retirement in 1983 at Kyoto University in Japan. In 1972, Kumada's group reported nickel-catalyzed cross coupling reactions nearly concurrently with the Corriu group working in France. The Kumada coupling now bears his name.
Go to Profile#149
John Polanyi
#3440
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
John Charles Polanyi is a German-born Canadian chemist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in chemical kinetics. Polanyi was born into the prominent Hungarian Polányi family in Berlin, Germany, prior to emigrating in 1933 to the United Kingdom where he was subsequently educated at the University of Manchester, and did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and Princeton University in New Jersey. Polanyi's first academic appointment was at the University of Toronto, and he remains there .
Go to Profile#150
Susan Solomon
#5999
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
