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,
#151
Paul Alivisatos
#6372
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Armand Paul Alivisatos is an American chemist and academic administrator who has served as the 14th president of the University of Chicago since September 2021. He is a pioneer in nanomaterials development and an authority on the fabrication of nanocrystals and their use in biomedical and renewable energy applications. He was ranked fifth among the world's top 100 chemists for the period 2000–2010 in the list released by Thomson Reuters.
Go to Profile#152
Jeffrey Harborne
#18131
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Jeffrey Barry Harborne FRS was a British chemist who specialised in phytochemistry. He was Professor of Botany at the University of Reading, 1976–93, then Professor emeritus. He contributed to more than 40 books and 270 research papers and was a pioneer in ecological biochemistry, particularly in the complex chemical interactions between plants, microbes and insects.
Go to Profile#153
Amir H. Hoveyda
#19799
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Amir H. Hoveyda is an American organic chemist and professor of chemistry at Boston College, and held the position of department chair until 2018. In 2019, he embarked as researcher at the Institute of Science and Supramolecular Engineering at University of Strasbourg.
Go to Profile#154
R. Stephen Berry
#6639
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Richard Stephen Berry was an American professor of physical chemistry. He was the James Franck Distinguished Service Professor, emeritus,, at The University of Chicago. He was also special advisor for national security to the director, at Argonne National Laboratory.
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Man Mohan Sharma
#10193
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Man Mohan Sharma, is an Indian chemical engineer. He was educated at Jodhpur, Mumbai, and Cambridge. At age 27, he was appointed Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. He later went on to become the Director of UDCT, the first chemical engineering professor to do so from UDCT.
Go to Profile#156
Michael Smith
#2970
Overall Influence
1932 - 2000 (68 years)
Michael Smith was a British-born Canadian biochemist and businessman. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kary Mullis for his work in developing site-directed mutagenesis. Following a PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester, he undertook postdoctoral research with Har Gobind Khorana at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Subsequently, Smith worked at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver before being appointed a professor of biochemistry in the UBC Faculty of Medicine in 1966. Smith's career included roles...
Go to Profile#157
John Maddox
#2579
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Sir John Royden Maddox, FRS was a Welsh theoretical chemist, physicist, and science writer. He was an editor of Nature for 22 years, from 1966 to 1973 and 1980 to 1995. Education and early life John Royden Maddox was born on 27 November 1925, at Penllergaer near Swansea, Wales. He was the son of Arthur Jack Maddox, a furnaceman at an aluminium plant. He was educated at Gowerton Boys' County School. From there, aged 15, he won a state scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read chemistry, and King's College London, where he studied physics.
Go to Profile#158
Stefan Grimme
#16922
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Stefan Grimme , is a German physical chemist; he completed a Ph.D. thesis on photochemistry at Technical University of Braunschweig in 1991; he is a professor at the Universität Bonn since 2011 who is active in the field of computational chemistry; he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2018.
Go to Profile#159
James R. Heath
#10653
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
James R. Heath is an American chemist and the president and professor of Institute of Systems Biology. Previous to this, he was the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, after having moved from University of California Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#160
Kendall Houk
#18984
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Kendall Newcomb Houk is a Distinguished Research Professor in Organic Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research group studies organic, organometallic, and biological reactions using the tools of computational chemistry. This work involves quantum mechanical calculations, often with density functional theory, and molecular dynamics, either quantum dynamics for small systems or force fields such as AMBER, for solution and protein simulations.
Go to Profile#161
Larry E. Overman
#17559
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#162
Jens Christian Skou
#3673
Overall Influence
1918 - 2018 (100 years)
Jens Christian Skou was a Danish biochemist and Nobel laureate. Early life Skou was born in Lemvig, Denmark to a wealthy family. His father Magnus Martinus Skou was a timber and coal merchant. His mother Ane-Margrethe Skou took over the company after the death of his father. At the age of 15, Skou entered a boarding school in Haslev, Zealand. He graduated in medicine from the University of Copenhagen in 1944 and received his doctorate in 1954. He began working at the Aarhus University in 1947 and was appointed professor of biophysics in 1977. He retired from the Aarhus University in 1988, but...
Go to Profile#163
Eugene G. Rochow
#18927
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Eugene George Rochow was an American inorganic chemist. Rochow worked on organosilicon chemistry; in the 1940s, he described the direct process, also known as the Rochow process or Müller-Rochow process.
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Stanley Pons
#5932
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Bobby Stanley Pons is an American electrochemist known for his work with Martin Fleischmann on cold fusion in the 1980s and 1990s. Early life Pons was born in Valdese, North Carolina. He attended Valdese High School, then Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he studied chemistry. He began his PhD studies in chemistry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but left before completing his PhD. His thesis resulted in a paper, co-authored in 1967 with Harry B. Mark, his adviser. The New York Times wrote that it pioneered a way to measure the spectra of chemical react...
Go to Profile#165
Johann Deisenhofer
#2420
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Johann Deisenhofer is a German biochemist who, along with Hartmut Michel and Robert Huber, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for their determination of the first crystal structure of an integral membrane protein, a membrane-bound complex of proteins and co-factors that is essential to photosynthesis.
Go to Profile#166
Alan R. Katritzky
#17075
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Alan Roy Katritzky FRS was a British-born American chemist, latterly working at the University of Florida. He was a heterocyclic chemistry pioneer, who played a leading role in the subject’s elucidation and development.
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Hitoshi Nozaki
#17078
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Hitoshi Nozaki, sometimes spelled Hitosi, was a Japanese chemist specializing in the field of organic chemistry, known as the head of Japanese organic chemistry research, and one of the discoverers of Nozaki–Hiyama–Kishi reaction. He was Emeritus Professor of Kyoto University.
Go to Profile#168
Ernest R. Davidson
#19458
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ernest R. Davidson, born October 12, 1936, in Terre Haute, Indiana, is a former professor of chemistry, University of Washington and Indiana University-Bloomington . He graduated from Wiley High School, Terre Haute and Rose Polytechnic Institute , Terre Haute, and Indiana University , Bloomington, Indiana.
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Philip Ball
#3875
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Philip Ball is a British science writer. For over twenty years he has been an editor of the journal Nature, for which he continues to write regularly. He is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine and a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and BBC Future.
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Norman Allinger
#16715
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Norman "Lou" Allinger was an American organic and computational chemist and Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Georgia in Athens. Lou Allinger was the elder of two children of Norman Clark Allinger and Florence Helen . He was born in Alameda, California.
Go to Profile#171
Fred Basolo
#17656
Overall Influence
1920 - 2007 (87 years)
Fred Basolo was an American inorganic chemist. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1943, under Prof. John C. Bailar, Jr. Basolo spent his professional career at Northwestern University. He was a prolific contributor to the fields of coordination chemistry, organometallic, and bioinorganic chemistry, publishing over 400 papers. He supervised many Ph.D. students. With colleague Ralph Pearson, he co-authored the influential monograph "Mechanisms of Inorganic Reactions", which illuminated the importance of mechanisms involving coordination compounds. This w...
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M. Frederick Hawthorne
#16682
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Marion Frederick Hawthorne was an inorganic chemist who made contributions to the chemistry of boron hydrides, especially their clusters. Early life and education Hawthorne was born on August 24, 1928, in Fort Scott, Kansas. He received his elementary and secondary education in Kansas and Missouri. Prior to high school graduation, he entered the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, Rolla, Missouri through examination as a chemical engineering student. He then transferred to Pomona College, where he received a B.A. degree in chemistry in 1949. While there he conducted research with Corwin Hansch.
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Henry F. Schaefer III
#22686
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Henry Frederick "Fritz" Schaefer III is a computational and theoretical chemist. He is one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, with a Thomson Reuters H-Index of 121 as of 2020. He is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia. Before becoming professor at Georgia he was professor at University of California, Berkeley and in 2004, he became Professor of Chemistry Emeritus, at UC Berkeley
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Raymond Lemieux
#14577
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Raymond Urgel Lemieux, CC, AOE, FRS was a Canadian organic chemist, who pioneered many discoveries in the field of chemistry, his first and most famous being the synthesis of sucrose. His contributions include the discovery of the anomeric effect and the development of general methodologies for the synthesis of saccharides still employed in the area of carbohydrate chemistry. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society , and a recipient of the prestigious Albert Einstein World Award of Science and Wolf Prize in Chemistry.
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William Andrew Goddard III
#17469
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
William Andrew Goddard III is the Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry and Applied Physics, and director of the Materials and Process Simulation Center at the California Institute of Technology.
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Ivar Karl Ugi
#22592
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Ivar Karl Ugi was an Estonian-born German chemist who made major contributions to organic chemistry. He is known for the research on multicomponent reactions, yielding the Ugi reaction. Biography After he went to Germany from Estonia in 1941 he began his studies of chemistry in 1949 at the University of Tübingen until 1951. He became Dr. rer. nat. in 1954 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He did his habilitation 1960 at the same university. After a short but very successful career in industry at Bayer from 1962 until 1968 when he joined the University of Southern California at Lo...
Go to Profile#177
Werner Kutzelnigg
#21571
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Werner Kutzelnigg was a prominent Austrian-born theoretical chemist and professor in the Chemistry Faculty, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Kutzelnigg was born in Vienna. His most significant contributions were in the following fields: relativistic quantum chemistry, coupled cluster methods, theoretical calculation of NMR chemical shifts, explicitly correlated wavefunctions. He was a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.
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Akira Fujishima
#8501
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Akira Fujishima is a Japanese chemist and president of Tokyo University of Science. He is known for significant contributions to the discovery and research of photocatalytic and superhydrophilic properties of titanium dioxide , which is also known as the Honda-Fujishima effect.
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Robert G. Bergman
#18159
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#180
Omar M. Yaghi
#16422
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Omar M. Yaghi is the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, an affiliate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, and an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences as well as the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Go to Profile#181
Itamar Willner
#20258
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#182
Eiji Osawa
#14599
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
is a former professor of computational chemistry, noted for his prediction of the C60 molecule in 1970. Osawa received his Master's of Engineering in chemistry from Kyoto University's Department of Industrial Chemistry and then became an engineer at Teijin Co., Ltd. In 1964, he returned to Kyoto University and earned a Doctorate of Engineering in chemistry under Professor M. Yoshida. After three years of postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin, Princeton University, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in 1970 he became an assistant professor at Hokkaido University. In...
Go to Profile#183
Paul von Ragué Schleyer
#21630
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Paul von Ragué Schleyer was an American physical organic chemist whose research is cited with great frequency. A 1997 survey indicated that Dr. Schleyer was, at the time, the world's third most cited chemist, with over 1100 technical papers produced. He was Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, professor and co-director of the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in Germany, and later Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. He published twelve books in the fields of lithium chemistry, ab initio molecular orbital theory and carbonium ions.
Go to Profile#184
Chad Mirkin
#9970
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Chad Alexander Mirkin is an American chemist. He is the George B. Rathmann professor of chemistry, professor of medicine, professor of materials science and engineering, professor of biomedical engineering, and professor of chemical and biological engineering, and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly at Northwestern University.
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Albert Meyers
#25774
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Albert I. Meyers was an American organic chemist, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University, and member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Born in New York City, Meyers earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees from New York University in 1954 and 1957, respectively. After finishing his graduate degree, Meyers worked as a research chemist for a year before joining the faculty of Louisiana State University as an associate professor. He rose to the rank of full professor in 1964, and was a special NIH fellow at Harvard University in 1965–1966. Meyers later ...
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Jerry March
#19906
Overall Influence
1929 - 1997 (68 years)
Jerry March, Ph.D. was an American organic chemist and a professor of chemistry at Adelphi University. March authored the March's Advanced Organic Chemistry text, which is considered to be a pillar of graduate-level organic chemistry texts. The book was prepared in its fifth edition at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#187
Benjamin List
#5430
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Benjamin List is a German chemist who is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research and professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cologne. He co-developed organocatalysis, a method of accelerating chemical reactions and making them more efficient. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis".
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Joshua Jortner
#8093
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Joshua Jortner is an Israeli physical chemist. He is a professor emeritus at the School of Chemistry, The Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. Birth and education Jortner was born on March 14, 1933, in Tarnów, Poland, to a Jewish family. He migrated with his parents to Palestine under the British Mandate during the Second World War in 1940. He received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1960.
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Yury Gogotsi
#10632
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Yury Georgievich Gogotsi is a Ukrainian scientist in the field of material chemistry, professor at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA since the year 2000 in the fields of Materials Science and Engineering and Nanotechnology. Distinguished University and Trustee Chair professor of materials science at Drexel University — director of the A.J. Drexel Nanotechnology Institute .
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Stuart Schreiber
#10260
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Stuart Schreiber, Ph.D. is the Morris Loeb Research Professor at Harvard University, a co-Founder of the Broad Institute, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Emeritus, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine. His work integrates chemical biology and human biology to advance the science of therapeutics. Key advances include the discovery that small molecules can function as “molecular glues” that promote protein–protein interactions, the co-discovery of mTOR and its role in nutrient-response signaling, the discovery of histone deacetylases and...
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Vincenzo Barone
#24005
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Vincenzo Barone is an Italian chemist, active in the field of theoretical and computational chemistry. He became full professor of physical chemistry at the University of Naples in 1994, and professor of theoretical and computational chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 2009.
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Frank Neese
#17919
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Frank Neese is a German theoretical chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research. He is the author of more than 440 scientific articles in journals of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Physics. His work focuses on the theory of magnetic spectroscopies and their experimental and theoretical application, local pair natural orbital correlation theories, spectroscopy oriented configuration interaction, electronic and geometric structure and reactivity of transition metal complexes and metalloenzymes. He is lead author of the ORCA quantum chemistry computer program. His methods have been applie...
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Frances Arnold
#3660
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#194
Michael Fisher
#6973
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Michael Ellis Fisher was an English physicist, as well as chemist and mathematician, known for his many seminal contributions to statistical physics, including but not restricted to the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena. He was the Horace White Professor of Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics at Cornell University. Later he moved to the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, where he was University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.
Go to Profile#195
David Leigh
#19111
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#196
Kurt Mislow
#26022
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Kurt Martin Mislow was a German-born American organic chemist who specialized in stereochemistry. Born in Berlin on June 5, 1923, Mislow had moved to London by 1938, after some time in Milan. With the help of his uncle Alfred Eisenstaedt, Mislow's family left London for New York City in 1940. Mislow earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Tulane University in 1944, and received a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology, where he was supervised by Linus Pauling. Mislow first taught at New York University, then moved to Princeton University in 1964. While at Princeton, Mislow...
Go to Profile#197
Nicholas A. Peppas
#7447
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#198
Leo Paquette
#24055
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Leo Armand Paquette was an American organic chemist. Biography Paquette was born on July 15, 1934. He received his B.S. degree in 1956 from the College of the Holy Cross and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 with professor Norman Allan Nelson. After serving as a research associate at the Upjohn Company from 1959 to 1963, he joined the faculty of Ohio State University .
Go to Profile#199
Arumugam Manthiram
#14188
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Arumugam Manthiram is an American materials scientist and engineer, best known for his identification of the polyanion class of lithium ion battery cathodes, understanding of how chemical instability limits the capacity of layered oxide cathodes, and technological advances in lithium sulfur batteries. He is a Cockrell Family Regents Chair in engineering, Director of the Texas Materials Institute, the Director of the Materials Science and Engineering Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and a former lecturer of Madurai Kamaraj University. Manthiram delivered the 2019 Nobel Lecture in Chemistry on behalf of Chemistry Laureate John B.
Go to Profile#200
James A. Ibers
#25559
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
James A. Ibers was the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry before becoming an emeritus professor of chemistry at Northwestern University upon retirement. He is recognized for contributions to inorganic chemistry, especially in the areas of coordination chemistry, bio-inorganic chemistry, solid state synthesis and X-ray crystallography. Ibers passed on December 14, 2021 at the age of 91.
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