Famous Chemists

Chemistry is a study of reactions between chemicals and substances that most people experience in their everday life. All of our medicines and household products are the result of a history of chemical studies and discoveries. Below is a list of some of the most important chemists of all time organized by the significance of their contributions to this field.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie was a famous Polish chemist. Marie and her husband Pierre Curie were early researchers in radioactivity. She received her first Nobel Prize in 1903 for physics, together with Pierre and He...

Marie Curie
John Dalton

John Dalton was born in Eaglesfield, England in the year 1766. He is acknowledged for his research work in the formation of modern atomic theory as well as color blindness. He is often regarded as the...

John Dalton
Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday was one of the great scientists of the nineteenth century, who amongst his other discoveries, helped to convert electricity into a property that could be easily utilized. His main disc...

Michael Faraday
Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin, a famous scientist from London, laid the groundwork for many scientists in the area of genetics. Her role in discovering the DNA’s helical structure was widely acknowledged during h...

Rosalind Franklin
Robert Boyle

Commonly referred to as the “Father of Chemistry,” Robert Boyle was one of the most influential scientists of his time. His vast knowledge and influence in chemistry has been recognized for a long tim...

Robert Boyle
Dmitri Mendeleev

Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian scientist who is best known for creating the Periodic Table of elements. He was born in Siberia in 1834 into a large and reasonably well-off family. His surname is somet...

Dmitri Mendeleev
Mario Molina

Almost everyone knows that chlorofluorocarbon gases, or CFCs, are bad for our environment. Most governments are striving to achieve lower CFC emissions to save the ozone layer. The world first heard a...

Mario Molina
Fritz Haber

Fritz Haber was a physical chemist from Germany. He was the winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry for his successful work on nitrogen fixation in the year 1918. He is well known during WWI for his su...

Fritz Haber
Svante Arrhenius

Svante Arrhenius was a renowned Swedish chemist who was born in Wik Castle, Sweden in 1859. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1905. Although generally considered a chemist, Arrhenius was...

Svante Arrhenius
Frederick Sanger

Frederick Sanger was a biochemist who was born in England in 1918. Sanger became quite interested in science and nature as a child. He won the Nobel Prize award in 1958 in Chemistry for discovering in...

Frederick Sanger
Thomas Graham

Thomas Graham was a Scottish chemist best known for his leading work in the diffusion and dialysis of gases.

Thomas Graham
Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur was a French chemist who made a lot of contributions to medicine, chemistry and industry that greatly benefited humanity. His discovery that bacteria spread diseases has saved countless ...

Louis Pasteur
George Washington Carver

Famous for his calm perseverance that led to major advances in agriculture and crop management, George Washington Carver was truly a champion who set an impressive example for others who would see an ...

George Washington Carver
Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel was born on October 21st, 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden. History shows that the men in his family were mostly engineers and businessmen and Alfred was quick to follow in their footsteps. In 1...

Alfred Nobel
Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine Lavoisier was a French nobleman who was a very prominent figure in biology and chemistry. He gave hydrogen and oxygen their names. He made very valuable contributions to the metric system. Thi...

Antoine Lavoisier
Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling made important contributions in chemistry, mineralogy, the structure of proteins and many other biologically important elements, quantum mechanics, nuclear structure, the nature of menta...

Linus Pauling
Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestley is best known for isolating and discovering oxygen, along with several other gases. He was a leading contemporary thinker and covered a lot of areas other than chemistry. This include...

Joseph Priestley
Humphry Davy

Sir Humphry Davy was a great English chemist and inventor who is best remembered for his discoveries of many alkali and alkaline earth metals. He also helped to better understand the properties of iod...

Humphry Davy
Otto Hahn

Otto Hahn, popularly regarded as father of nuclear chemistry, was a Nobel laureate and a German chemist. He was a pioneer in the fields of radio-chemistry and radioactivity.

Otto Hahn
Ahmed Zewail

Ahmed Zewail is a famous scientist who was born on February 26th, 1946, in Damanhour, Egypt. He is known by many as the father of femtochemistry. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in th...

Ahmed Zewail
Stanislao Cannizzaro

Stanislao Cannizzaro was a very famous Italian chemist. Today, he is remembered for the Cannizzaro reaction which is named after him. He is also known for his important role regarding the atomic-weigh...

Stanislao Cannizzaro