PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: chemistry
British physicist and chemist
Michael Faraday, English physicist and chemist whose many experiments contributed greatly to the understanding of electromagnetism. Faraday, who became one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century,...
French chemist and microbiologist
Louis Pasteur, French chemist and microbiologist who was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology. Pasteur’s contributions to science, technology, and medicine are nearly without precedent....
French chemist
Antoine Lavoisier, prominent French chemist and leading figure in the 18th-century chemical revolution who developed an experimentally based theory of the chemical reactivity of oxygen and coauthored the...
Swedish chemist
Jöns Jacob Berzelius, one of the founders of modern chemistry. He is especially noted for his determination of atomic weights, the development of modern chemical symbols, his electrochemical theory, the...
German chemist
Justus, baron von Liebig, German chemist who made significant contributions to the analysis of organic compounds, the organization of laboratory-based chemistry education, and the application of chemistry...
British scientist
Joseph Black, British chemist and physicist best known for the rediscovery of “fixed air” (carbon dioxide), the concept of latent heat, and the discovery of the bicarbonates (such as bicarbonate of soda)....
English clergyman and scientist
Joseph Priestley, English clergyman, political theorist, and physical scientist whose work contributed to advances in liberal political and religious thought and in experimental chemistry. He is best remembered...
Russian scientist
Dmitri Mendeleev, Russian chemist who developed the periodic classification of the elements. Mendeleev found that, when all the known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight,...
American scientist
Linus Pauling, American theoretical physical chemist who became the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes. His first prize (1954) was awarded for research into the nature of the chemical bond...
British physicist
Henry Cavendish, natural philosopher, the greatest experimental and theoretical English chemist and physicist of his age. Cavendish was distinguished for great accuracy and precision in research into the...
French chemist
Claude-Louis Berthollet, central French figure in the emergence of chemistry as a modern discipline in the late 18th century. He combined acute experimental skills with fundamental theoretical proposals...
French scientist
Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, French chemist and physicist who pioneered investigations into the behaviour of gases, established new techniques for analysis, and made notable advances in applied chemistry....
British scientist
John Dalton, English meteorologist and chemist, a pioneer in the development of modern atomic theory. Dalton was born into a Quaker family of tradesmen; his grandfather Jonathan Dalton was a shoemaker,...
Polish-born French physicist
Marie Curie, Polish-born French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel...
Swedish inventor
Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist who invented dynamite and other more powerful explosives and who also founded the Nobel Prizes. Alfred Nobel was the fourth son of Immanuel and...
British chemist
Sir Humphry Davy, English chemist who discovered several chemical elements (including sodium and potassium) and compounds, invented the miner’s safety lamp, and became one of the greatest exponents of...
American chemist
Irving Langmuir, American physical chemist who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Chemistry “for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry.” He was the second American and the first industrial...
American chemist
Gilbert N. Lewis, American physical chemist best known for his contributions to chemical thermodynamics, the electron-pair model of the covalent bond, the electronic theory of acids and bases, the separation...
Israeli president and scientist
Chaim Weizmann, first president of the new nation of Israel (1949–52), who was for decades the guiding spirit behind the World Zionist Organization. Chaim Azriel Weizmann was born of humble parents in...
American chemist
Harold C. Urey, American scientist awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1934 for his discovery of the heavy form of hydrogen known as deuterium. He was a key figure in the development of the atomic...
American agricultural chemist
George Washington Carver, American agricultural chemist, agronomist, and experimenter whose development of new products derived from peanuts (groundnuts), sweet potatoes, and soybeans helped revolutionize...
Anglo-Irish philosopher and writer
Robert Boyle, Anglo-Irish natural philosopher and theological writer, a preeminent figure of 17th-century intellectual culture. He was best known as a natural philosopher, particularly in the field of...
Italian chemist
Stanislao Cannizzaro, Italian chemist who was closely associated with a crucial reform movement in science. Cannizzaro, the son of a magistrate, studied medicine at the universities in Palermo and Naples...
Swiss chemist
Alfred Werner, Swiss chemist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1913 for his research into the structure of coordination compounds. Werner was the fourth and last child of Jean-Adam Werner,...
French chemist
Pierre-Eugène-Marcellin Berthelot, French organic and physical chemist, science historian, and government official. His creative thought and work significantly influenced the development of chemistry in...
German chemist and physician
Georg Ernst Stahl, German educator, chemist, and esteemed medical theorist and practitioner. His chemical theory of phlogiston dominated European chemistry until the “Chemical Revolution” at the end of...
French chemist
Charles Gerhardt, French chemist who was an important precursor of the German chemist August Kekule and his structural organic chemistry. Gerhardt’s Swiss-born father, Samuel Gerhardt, initially worked...
German chemist
Friedrich Wöhler, German chemist who was one of the finest and most prolific of the 19th century. Wöhler, the son of an agronomist and veterinarian, attended the University of Marburg and then the University...
American chemist
Glenn T. Seaborg, American nuclear chemist best known for his work on isolating and identifying transuranium elements (those heavier than uranium). He shared the 1951 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Edwin...
French chemist
Auguste Laurent, French chemist who helped lay the foundations of organic chemistry. After conventional classical schooling, Laurent earned an undergraduate degree in engineering from the prestigious École...
French chemist
Michel-Eugène Chevreul, French chemist who elucidated the chemical composition of animal fats and whose theories of colour influenced the techniques of French painting. Chevreul belonged to a family of...
French chemist
Joseph-Louis Proust, French chemist who proved that the relative quantities of any given pure chemical compound’s constituent elements remain invariant, regardless of the compound’s source. This is known...
English chemist
Dorothy Hodgkin, English chemist whose determination of the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12 brought her the 1964 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Dorothy Crowfoot was the eldest of four sisters whose...
English astronomer
Sir John Herschel, 1st Baronet, English astronomer and successor to his father, Sir William Herschel, in the field of stellar and nebular observation and discovery. An only child, John was educated briefly...
American chemist
Robert Burns Woodward, American chemist best known for his syntheses of complex organic substances, including cholesterol and cortisone (1951), strychnine (1954), and vitamin B12 (1971). He was awarded...
British chemist
Sir William Ramsay, British physical chemist who discovered four gases (neon, argon, krypton, xenon) and showed that they (with helium and radon) formed an entire family of new elements, the noble gases....
Scottish geologist
James Hutton, Scottish geologist, chemist, naturalist, and originator of one of the fundamental principles of geology—uniformitarianism, which explains the features of the Earth’s crust by means of natural...
German chemist
Karl Ziegler, German chemist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with the Italian chemist Giulio Natta. Ziegler’s research with organometallic compounds made possible industrial production of...
British scientist
William Hyde Wollaston, British scientist who enhanced the techniques of powder metallurgy to become the first to produce and market pure, malleable platinum. He also made fundamental discoveries in many...
French chemist and educator
Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, French chemist who played a major part in the reform of chemical nomenclature. The son of a lawyer, Guyton added the title de Morveau (from a family property) to his name...
Muslim alchemist
Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, Muslim alchemist known as the father of Arabic chemistry. He systematized a “quantitative” analysis of substances and was the inspiration for Geber, a Latin alchemist who developed...
Swedish chemist
Carl Wilhelm Scheele, German Swedish chemist who independently discovered oxygen, chlorine, and manganese. Scheele, the son of a German merchant, was born in a part of Germany that was under Swedish jurisdiction....
Belgian scientist
Jan Baptista van Helmont, Flemish physician, philosopher, mystic, and chemist who recognized the existence of discrete gases and identified carbon dioxide. Van Helmont was born into a wealthy family of...
French chemist
Henry-Louis Le Chatelier, French chemist who is best known for Le Chatelier’s principle, which makes it possible to predict the effect a change of conditions (such as temperature, pressure, or concentration...
German chemist
August Kekule von Stradonitz, German chemist who established the foundation for the structural theory in organic chemistry. Kekule was born into an upper-middle-class family of civil servants and as a...
British chemist
Sir Derek H.R. Barton, joint recipient, with Odd Hassel of Norway, of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on “conformational analysis,” the study of the three-dimensional geometric structure...
French chemist
Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas, French chemist who pioneered in organic chemistry, particularly organic analysis. Dumas’s father was the town clerk, and Dumas attended the local school. Although briefly apprenticed...
American chemist
Willard Frank Libby, American chemist whose technique of carbon-14 (or radiocarbon) dating provided an extremely valuable tool for archaeologists, anthropologists, and earth scientists. For this development...
German chemist
Emil Fischer, German chemist who was awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of his investigations of the sugar and purine groups of substances. Fischer was the eighth child and only...
German chemist
Hermann Kolbe, German chemist who accomplished the first generally accepted synthesis of an organic compound from inorganic materials. Kolbe studied chemistry with Friedrich Wöhler at the University of...
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