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,

#3001

L. Douglas Smoot

L. Douglas Smoot
#100596
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Leon Douglas Smoot was an American chemical engineering professor and researcher. He was most noted for his work in aerospace and rocket propulsion and later his work on fossil fuels and energy. Smoot worked in various capacities at Brigham Young University for over 35 years, and consulted with over sixty companies and agencies for energy and combustion throughout the United States and Europe. He was a member of American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Society for Engineering Education, The Combustion Institute, and National Fire Protection Association and authored or co-authored ov...
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#3002

Martin A. Bennett

#130109
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Martin Arthur Bennett FRS is an Australian inorganic chemist. He gained recognition for studies on the co-ordination chemistry of tertiary phosphines, olefins, and acetylenes, and the relationship of their behaviour to homogeneous catalysis.
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#3003

William Weltner

#130114
Overall Influence
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#3004

Michael A. Beaven

#130159
Overall Influence
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#3005

Kersti Hermansson

#113504
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Kersti Hermansson is a Professor for Inorganic Chemistry at Uppsala University. Education and professional career She did her PhD on "The Electron Distribution in the Bound Water Molecule" in 1984. From 1984 to 1986, she had a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swedish Research Council with Dr. E. Clementi at IBM-Kingston, USA. From 1986–1988, she was a Högskolelektor in Inorganic Chemistry at Uppsala University. In 1988, she was a docent of Inorganic Chemistry at Uppsala University. In 1996, she was a Biträdande professor. Since 2000, she is a professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Uppsala University.
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#3006

John M. Torkelson

#119970
Overall Influence
John Mark Torkelson is an American physicist. Torkelson earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1978 and doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1983. He holds the Walter P. Murphy Professorship in Chemical and Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. In 1999, Torkelson was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society "[f]or imaginative and successful applications of fluorescence spectroscopy to polymer physics issues ranging from free volume to free radical polymerization."
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#3007

James Caruthers

#121124
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
James M. Caruthers is an American chemical engineer, currently Gerald and Sarah Skidmore Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Caruthers got his S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975, 1976 and 1977, respectively.
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#3008

William C. Jost

#130191
Overall Influence
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#3009

Ian Gordon Dance

#130211
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
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#3010

Julia Laskin

#109432
Overall Influence
Julia Laskin is the William F. and Patty J. Miller Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Purdue University. Her research is focused on the fundamental understanding of ion-surface collisions, understanding of phenomena underlying chemical analysis of large molecules in complex heterogeneous environments, and the development of new instrumentation and methods in preparative and imaging mass spectrometry.
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#3011

Jörg E. Drewes

#130252
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
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#3012

John L. Magee

#129993
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
John Lafayette Magee was an American chemist known for his work on kinetic models of radiation chemistry, especially the Samuel-Magee model for describing radiolysis in solution. Education and career Magee obtained his A.B. at Mississippi College in 1935, M.S. at Vanderbilt University in 1936, and his Ph.D. in chemistry at University of Wisconsin in 1939, under the supervision of Farrington Daniels. He then worked with Henry Eyring at Princeton University during his postdoctoral research. Between 1943 and 1946, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Manhattan Project. Afterwards, he moved to Argonne National Laboratory.
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#3013

Sue Gibson

#96623
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Susan Elizabeth Gibson is a British research chemist, Professor and Chair in Chemistry and Director of the Graduate School at Imperial College London. Gibson is an expert in chemical synthesis and catalysis.
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#3014

Paul Bohn

#126603
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Paul William Bohn is an American chemist who researches molecular nanotechnology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Royal Society of Chemistry, and Society for Applied Spectroscopy, as well as a co-editor of the Annual Review of Analytical Chemistry.
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#3015

Karen Gleason

#113874
Overall Influence
Karen Klincewicz Gleason is the Associate Provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she has also served as the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser Professor of Chemical Engineering, from 2006–present. She has invented over 15 patented designs. She has developed a hydrophobic surface that can be applied in energy harvesting.
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#3016

Morris Krauss

#130313
Overall Influence
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#3017

Wolfram Jaegermann

#130324
Overall Influence
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#3018

Susumu Namba

#130332
Overall Influence
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#3019

Angelos Michaelides

#130335
Overall Influence
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#3020

Mark H. Thiemens

#120913
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Mark Howard Thiemens is a distinguished professor and the John Doves Isaacs Endowed Chair in Natural Philosophy of Physical Sciences in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California San Diego. He is best known for the discovery of a new physical chemical phenomena termed the mass independent isotope effect.
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#3021

Murali Sastry

#130349
Overall Influence
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#3022

Shozo Yamamoto

#130350
Overall Influence
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#3023

Giovanni Camino

#130354
Overall Influence
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#3024

Paul C. Painter

#130376
Overall Influence
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#3025

Seth Darst

#95142
Overall Influence
Seth A. Darst is a Jack Fishman Professor of molecular biophysics at the Rockefeller University. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2008. Life and career Darst earned his B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1982. He continued his education with advisor Channing R. Robertson at Stanford University, where he earned both M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering. Darst completed postdoctoral training, also at Stanford, as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow and a Lucille P. Markley Postdoctoral Scholar in the laboratory of Roger D.
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#3026

Jörg Prof. Dr. Kreuter

#130422
Overall Influence
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#3027

Huai‐wu Zhang

#130433
Overall Influence
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#3028

Alan A. Jones

#78668
Overall Influence
1944 - 2006 (62 years)
Alan Anthony Jones was an American professor of chemistry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. During his more than thirty years at Clark he served as a mentor and advisor to hundreds of undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students. He was a leading researcher in the field of NMR and polymer physics. His research focused on solid state NMR spectroscopy of polymer systems. This work was supported for many years through grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Petroleum Research Fund and the Army Research Office.
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#3029

Vernon Dwayne Parker

#130501
Overall Influence
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#3030

Keith A Johnson

#130508
Overall Influence
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#3031

Victoria Hale

#23470
Overall Influence
Victoria Hale founded the nonprofit pharmaceutical company The Institute for OneWorld Health in San Francisco, California in 2000 and was its chairman and CEO until 2008, when she became Chair Emeritus. She then went on to found Medicines360, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company dedicated to developing medicines for women and children, including pregnant women.
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#3032

Laura Lechuga

Laura Lechuga
#109276
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Laura M. Lechuga Gómez is a Spanish scientist who is a biosensor researcher and full professor. She leads the Nanobiosensors and Bioanalytical Application Group at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology .
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#3033

Marianne Baudler

#130584
Overall Influence
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#3034

Clare McCabe

#115581
Overall Influence
Clare McCabe is an American chemical engineer who is Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Engineering and professor of engineering at Vanderbilt University. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019. Her research makes use of molecular modelling to understand the properties of biological systems, fluids and nanomaterials.
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#3035

Janusz Jurczak

#130635
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
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#3036

Hiroshi Sano

#130647
Overall Influence
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#3037

Andréa E. Merbach

#130658
Overall Influence
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#3038

Robert Alan Young

#130676
Overall Influence
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#3039

Edison Liu

Edison Liu
#18882
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Edison T. Liu is an American chemist who is the former president and CEO of The Jackson Laboratory, and the former director of its NCI-designated Cancer Center . Before joining The Jackson Laboratory, he was the founding executive director of the Genome Institute of Singapore , chairman of the board of the Health Sciences Authority, and president of the Human Genome Organization . As the executive director of the GIS, he brought the institution to international prominence as one of the most productive genomics institutions in the world.
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#3040

Jennifer A. Logan

#130740
Overall Influence
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#3041

Katherine H. Freeman

#82073
Overall Influence
Katherine H. Freeman is the Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University and a co-editor of the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Her research interests are organic geochemistry, isotopic biogeochemistry, paleoclimate and astrobiology.
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#3042

Yoshio Okahata

#130775
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
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#3043

Carel Jan Van Oss

#130777
Overall Influence
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#3044

Rich Carter

#112989
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Rich G. Carter is Professor of Chemistry of the Department of Chemistry at Oregon State University. His research fields are synthetic organic chemistry in general and natural product synthesis. He is also the co-founder and CEO of a chemical manufacturing company Valliscor.
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#3045

Hiroshi Ohkawa

#130811
Overall Influence
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#3046

Julie A. Leary

#66447
Overall Influence
Julie A. Leary is a emeritus professor in the department of molecular and cellular biology at University of California, Davis and the department of chemistry. Early life and education Leary obtained a PhD in Chemistry Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, under the direction of Klaus Biemann.
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#3047

Aldo Roda

#130858
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
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#3048

Mitsuru Uchiyama

#130870
Overall Influence
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#3049

Regina Palkovits

#124618
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Regina Palkovits is a German chemist who is a Professor of Chemistry at the RWTH Aachen University. Her research considers heterogenous catalysis. She was elected a Fellow of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts in 2020.
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#3050

Sijbren Otto

#46203
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Sybren Otto is Professor of Systems chemistry at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry, University of Groningen. Career Otto studied chemistry at the University of Groningen and in 1994, he received his Master’s degree, focusing on physical organic chemistry and biochemistry, with the distinction cum laude. In 1998, he obtained his PhD, again with the distinction cum laude, from his supervisor Prof. Jan B.F.N. Engberts for his thesis entitled Catalysis of Diels-Alder reactions in water.
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