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,
#2301
James H. Espenson
#114394
Overall Influence
#2302
J. Lawrence Fox
#114433
Overall Influence
#2303
Francisco Xavier Malcata
#114436
Overall Influence
#2304
Abdullah Sener
#114439
Overall Influence
#2305
Robert Waymouth
#86452
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Robert M. Waymouth is an American chemist. He is the Robert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry at Stanford University. Early life and education He was born in 1960 in Warner Robins, Georgia. In 1982 he earned a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in mathematics from Washington and Lee University. He received a PhD in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1987 and did postdoctoral research at the Institut fur Polymere in Zurich, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#2306
Charles H. Langmuir
#114482
Overall Influence
#2307
James Ferris
#102793
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
James "Jim" P. Ferris was an American chemist. He is known for his contributions to the understanding of the origins of life on Earth, specifically by demonstrating a successful mechanism of clay-catalyzed polymerization of RNA, providing further evidence for the RNA World Hypothesis. Additionally, his work in atmospheric photochemistry has illuminated many of the chemical processes which occur in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn's moon, Titan.
Go to Profile#2308
John F. Brady
#103904
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
John Francis Brady is an American chemical engineer and the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is a fluid mechanician and creator of the Stokesian dynamics method for simulating suspensions of spheres and ellipsoids in low Reynolds number flows. He is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the Society of Rheology, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#2309
Gary T. Rochelle
#114602
Overall Influence
#2310
Vassya Bankova
#109235
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Vassya Stefanova Bankova is a Bulgarian chemist and a president of the Bulgarian Phytochemical Society, Correspondent Member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences since 2014. Bankova is a professor and Chief of the Chemistry of Natural Compounds Laboratory, at the Institute of Organic Chemistry with Centre of Phytochemistry , Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She is also an honorary professor on the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy, Sofia University. She is known as a propolis expert.
Go to Profile#2311
Markus Reichstein
#114618
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
#2312
Dennis G. Peters
#105408
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Dennis Gail Peters was an American analytical chemist who specialized in electrochemistry and was named the Herman T. Briscoe Professor at Indiana University in 1975. Peters led his own research group at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana until his death in 2020. Peters' research focused on the electrochemical behavior of halogenated organic compounds, more recently moving to focus on transition metal catalysts in regards to the oxidation and reduction of organic species. He authored or co-authored over 210 publications and 5 analytical chemistry textbooks.
Go to Profile#2313
Reginald H. Mitchell
#114708
Overall Influence
#2314
András Perczel
#111660
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
András Perczel is a Hungarian chemist, biochemist, university professor, an elected member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His major field of research is structural chemistry and biology including synthesis of biomolecules and NMR spectroscopy of peptides and proteins. He was awarded the Bolyai prize in 2011.
Go to Profile#2315
Atta-ur Rahman
#29446
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Atta-ur-Rahman , h-index 75, with 36,000 citations is a Pakistani organic chemist and is currently serving as Professor Emeritus at the International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences at the University of Karachi and as Chairman of PM Task Force on Science and Technology. He has twice served as the President of Pakistan Academy of Sciences . He was the Federal Minister of Science and Technology , Federal Minister of Education and Chairman Higher Education Commission with status of Federal Minister He is also the President of the Network of Academies of Sciences in Countries of the Organisation of Islamic Countries .
Go to Profile#2316
Nikolay Enikolopov
#84086
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Nikolay Sergeyevich Enikolopov was an Armenian-Russian scientist, Doctor of Chemistry, professor, academic of Russian Academy of Sciences, director of the Institute of Synthetic polymers of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1980 he was awarded by the Lenin Prize.
Go to Profile#2317
André Bandrauk
#109533
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
André Dieter Bandrauk is a Canadian chemist and distinguished academic who is a professor of Theoretical chemistry at the University of Sherbrooke in Montreal. Born in war-time Berlin, Bandrauk immigrated to Canada with his family in 1951 and has been with the University of Sherbrooke since 1971.
Go to Profile#2318
Koichi Akashi
#114761
Overall Influence
#2320
Matthew S. Johnson
#92654
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Matthew Stanley Johnson is an American atmospheric chemistry scientist at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen. Johnson has made contributions to several areas of chemistry, including kinetics, spectroscopy, isotope effectss and application of atmospheric chemistry knowledge to air pollution control systems.
Go to Profile#2321
Albert E. Pullman
#114832
Overall Influence
#2322
Suzanne Blum
#92311
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Suzanne A. Blum is an American professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. Blum works on mechanistic chemistry, most recently focusing on borylation reactions and the development of single-molecule and single-particle fluorescence microscopy to study organic chemistry and catalysis. She received the American Chemical Society's Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award in 2023.
Go to Profile#2323
Randall Q. Snurr
#114855
Overall Influence
#2324
K. Birgitta Whaley
#64573
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Katherine Birgitta Whaley is a professor of chemistry at the University of California Berkeley and a senior faculty scientist in the Division of Chemical Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At UC Berkeley, Whaley is the director of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center, a member of the executive board for the Center for Quantum Coherent Science, and a member of the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Whaley is a member of the Quantum Algorithms Team for Chemical Sciences in the research area of resource-efficient algo...
Go to Profile#2325
William R. Heineman
#114881
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
#2326
Ka Yee Christina Lee
#39353
Overall Influence
Ka Yee Christina Lee is Executive Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry University of Chicago. She works on membrane biophysics, including protein–lipid interactions, Alzheimer's disease and respiratory distress syndrome. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and American Physical Society.
Go to Profile#2327
John H. R. Maunsell
#103260
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
John Henry Richard Maunsell is a British-American neuroscientist who is the Albert D. Lasker Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Formerly the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Neuroscience, as of 2021 he is a co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science.
Go to Profile#2328
Prof. Per-ake Albertsson
#114963
Overall Influence
#2329
Raffaele Mezzenga
#107486
Overall Influence
Raffaele Mezzenga is a soft condensed matter scientist, currently heading the Laboratory of Food and Soft Materials at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He is among the 0.1% most cited scientists according to the Clarivate 2023 Highly Cited Researchers list in the cross-field discipline.
Go to Profile#2330
Arthur E. Humphrey
#82704
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (98 years)
Arthur Earl Humphrey is an American chemical engineer. Humphrey was born in Moscow, Idaho and attended the University of Idaho, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University . He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Lehigh University and Pennsylvania State University after retiring from Lehigh.
Go to Profile#2331
William L. Epstein
#115113
Overall Influence
#2332
Richard Darton
#84049
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Richard Charles Darton, was Head of the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford from 2004 to 2009. For 2008-2009 he was President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers. From 1 January 2010 till 31 December 2014 he was President of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering.
Go to Profile#2333
Robert J. Cotter
#115171
Overall Influence
#2334
Eno Ebenso
#114093
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Eno E. Ebenso is a Professor of Physical Chemistry who specialise on corrosion inhibition. Early life and education Eno Ebenso was born on 18 November 1964 obtained in the Okobo local government area of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Ebenso obtained an BSc Honours in Chemistry from the University of Calabar, Nigeria in 1986, MSc in Physical Chemistry from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria in 1990, and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Calabar, Nigeria in 2004.
Go to Profile#2335
John Murrell
#52127
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
John Norman Murrell FRS was a British theoretical chemist who played a leading role in revolutionising the UK's reputation for theoretical chemistry during the second half of the 20th century. Biography Murrell was born in Brixton on 2 March 1932. His father, George Victor Murrell, was a salesman and bakery manager, and his mother was Winifred Edith née Walker.
Go to Profile#2336
Young-Tae Chang
#95786
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Young-Tae Chang is a South Korean chemist. He is a professor of chemistry at Pohang University of Science and Technology and Associate Director under Kim Kimoon at the Center for Self-assembly and Complexity at the Institute for Basic Science located on the POSTECH campus.
Go to Profile#2337
Takayuki Otsu
#115270
Overall Influence
#2338
Michael Zuker
#115271
Overall Influence
#2339
J. Jack Peisach
#115275
Overall Influence
#2340
Michael F. Brown
#54105
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Michael F. Brown is an American chemist. Since 1987, he has been a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arizona, and since 2003 has held joint appointments as a Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Mathematics. Prior to the University of Arizona, Brown earned tenure at the University of Virginia. His research involves the application of NMR spectroscopy and other biophysical methods to study membrane lipids, liquid crystals, and membrane proteins. Brown has particularly been a pioneer in the application of solid-state NMR spectroscopy to the study of lipid bilayer dynamics.
Go to Profile#2341
Yoon Nung-min
#26499
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Yoon Nung-min is a South Korean chemist, known for his research in organic chemistry, specializing in metal hydrides. He received his B.A. at Seoul National University in chemistry in 1951 and went on to complete his Ph.D. at Purdue University, under Herbert Charles Brown. He was a postdoc at Purdue, then a researcher for the Ministry of National Defence. He then became an associate professor at the Catholic University of Korea. He later took up full professorship at Sogang University, a position he would hold until his retirement. He served as the president of the Korean Chemical Society in 1989, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Korea in 2005.
Go to Profile#2342
Sture Forsén
#115375
Overall Influence
#2343
Teofil Jesionowski
#115470
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
#2344
Jonathan W. Steed
#115473
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
#2345
John D. Petersen
#74105
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
John D. Petersen is an American chemist and educator who was president of the University of Tennessee system. Early life and education A native of Los Angeles, California, John Petersen attended California State University, Los Angeles, where he received a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1970. In 1975 he received a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where his dissertation was entitled Photochemical and Photophysical Studies of Rhodium Ammine Complexes.
Go to Profile#2346
Jawed Fareed
#115493
Overall Influence
#2347
Uzi Even
#62837
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Uzi Even is an Israeli professor emeritus of physical chemistry at Tel Aviv University and a former politician well known for being the first openly gay member of the Knesset . Biography Uzi Even was born in Haifa during the British Mandate era. He earned a BSc and MSc in physics at the Technion, and a PhD at Tel Aviv University. His specializations are spectroscopy of super cold molecules, molecular clusters and cluster impact chemistry, and the quantum properties of helium clusters. He then worked as a scientist at the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona. He was officially a soldier i...
Go to Profile#2348
Edward William Schlag
#115555
Overall Influence
#2349
Philippe Sautet
#107385
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Philippe Sautet is a French chemist. He was elected to the French Academy of sciences on 30 November 2010. He was a research director at the CNRS and works in the chemistry laboratory of the École normale supérieure de Lyon where he devoted a large part of his scientific activity to molecular modelling. Now he is a professor at the University of California - Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#2350
Donald James Reed
#115666
Overall Influence
