Chemistry · Curated list
Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, Alfred Nobel and 37 more, ranked by how much of the world has written about each one.
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Most written-about first. Each description summarises the chemist's Wikipedia article, which its name links to.
1
Polish-French physicist and chemist (1867–1934)
Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie, a physicist and chemist who was Polish and a naturalised French citizen. The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics went jointly to her and her husband, Pierre Curie, "for their joint researches on the radioactivity phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".
Wikidata · Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
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2
French chemist, pharmacist and microbiologist (1822–1895)
A French microbiologist, pharmacist and chemist famed for discovering the principles of microbial fermentation and vaccination, and of pasteurisation, which bears his name. His chemical research brought remarkable advances in understanding what causes diseases and how to prevent them, laying the foundations of public health, hygiene and much of modern medicine.
Wikidata · Photo: Paul Nadar, Public domain
3
Swedish chemist and inventor (1833–1896)
Alfred Bernhard Nobel, a Swedish engineer, inventor, chemist and businessman. He is known for inventing dynamite and for leaving his fortune to set up the Nobel Prizes.
Wikidata · Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
4
English chemist and physicist (1791–1867)
An English physicist and chemist who contributed enormously to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Among his main discoveries are the principles behind electromagnetic induction, electrolysis and diamagnetism.
Wikidata · Photo: Thomas Phillips, Public domain
5
Russian chemist (1834–1907)
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, a Russian chemist known for stating the periodic law and devising a version of the periodic table of the elements. With the periodic law he corrected the properties then accepted for some known elements, such as uranium's atomic weight and valence, and predicted the properties of three elements not yet discovered.
Wikidata · Photo: Original: Unknown author Unknown author Upload: Germansociety2014, Public domain
6
New Zealand physicist and chemist (1871–1937)
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, a physicist and chemist from New Zealand who pioneered research in both nuclear and atomic physics. He has been called "the father of nuclear physics" and "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday".
Wikidata · Photo: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress), Public domain
7
French physicist and chemist (1859–1906)
A French physicist and chemist who pioneered work in magnetism and crystallography. For their work on radioactivity, he and his wife, Maria Skłodowska-Curie, received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1903.
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8
French nobleman and chemist (1743–1794)
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, known after the French Revolution as Antoine Lavoisier, a French chemist and nobleman. He was central to the chemical revolution of the 18th century and greatly influenced the history of both biology and chemistry.
Wikidata · Photo: Jacques-Louis David, Public domain
9
Anglo-Irish scientist (1627–1691)
An Anglo-Irish chemist, physicist, alchemist, inventor and natural philosopher. Today he is widely seen as the first modern chemist, and so as one of modern chemistry's founders, as well as a pioneer of the modern experimental scientific method.
Wikidata · Photo: Johann Kerseboom, Public domain
10
British chemist and physicist (1766–1844)
An English meteorologist, physicist and chemist whose work laid the foundations of stoichiometric chemistry and modern atomic theory. Building on older ideas that matter is indivisible, and on his own careful measurements of combining ratios, he proposed that every chemical element is made of identical atoms with a characteristic weight, and that compounds arise when the atoms of different elements join in fixed proportions of whole numbers.
11
French chemist and physicist (1897–1956)
A French physicist and chemist who, with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering induced radioactivity. In the course of that work the couple also discovered positron emission.
Wikidata · Photo: Nobel Foundation, Public domain
12
American scientist and activist (1901–1994)
Linus Carl Pauling, an American peace activist and chemist. Of the more than 1,200 books and papers he published, about 850 were on scientific subjects.
Wikidata · Photo: Nobel Foundation, Public domain
13
American biologist (1928–2025)
James Dewey Watson, an American zoologist, geneticist and molecular biologist. In 1953 he and Francis Crick wrote together an academic paper on DNA titled "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid".
Wikidata · Photo: Newspaper Enterprise Association, Public domain
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14
Russian polymath (1711–1765)
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, a Russian writer, scientist and polymath who contributed importantly to science, education and literature. His discoveries included the conservation of mass in chemical reactions, the atmosphere of Venus, the idea of coaxial rotors and a theoretical prediction of Antarctica.
Wikidata · Photo: After Georg Caspar Prenner, Public domain
15
English chemist (1910–1994)
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin, an English chemist who refined X-ray crystallography as a means of finding the structure of biomolecules, a technique that became essential to structural biology. She won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and no other British woman scientist has received a Nobel Prize.
Wikidata · Photo: University of Bristol, CC BY-SA 2.0
16
Swedish scientist (1859–1927)
Svante August Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist. A physicist by training, though often called a chemist, he was one of those who founded physical chemistry as a science.
Wikidata · Photo: Photogravure Meisenbach Riffarth & Co. Leipzig., Public domain
17
British chemist and inventor (1778–1829)
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet, a British inventor and chemist who invented the Davy lamp and an early type of arc lamp. He is remembered as well for using electricity to isolate several elements for the first time, sodium and potassium in 1807 and, a year later, boron, magnesium, barium, strontium and calcium, and for finding that iodine and chlorine are elements.
Wikidata · Photo: Thomas Phillips, Public domain
18
Dutch physical and organic chemist (1852–1911)
Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff Jr., a Dutch physical chemist and a very influential theoretician. In 1901 he won the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry "[for his] discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions".
Wikidata · Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
19
Islamic alchemist and polymath (died c. 806–816)
Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, who died c. 806−816, the purported author of a large body of Arabic writings, the so-called Jabirian corpus. Of these, c. 215 treatises have survived; they deal mostly with chemistry and alchemy, with magic and with Shi'ite religious philosophy.
Wikidata · Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
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20
German nuclear chemist and Nobel laureate (1879–1968)
A German chemist who pioneered radiochemistry. He is called the father of nuclear chemistry and the discoverer of nuclear fission, the science behind both nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
Wikidata · Photo: Nobel Foundation, Public domain
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21
German chemist (1868–1934)
Fritz Jakob Haber, a German chemist awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the Haber process, an industrial method of making ammonia from hydrogen gas and nitrogen gas. The invention is important for synthesising explosives and fertilisers on a large scale.
Wikidata · Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
22
English chemist and polymath (1733–1804)
An English chemist and natural philosopher who was also a Unitarian, a separatist theologian, a grammarian, a teacher of many subjects and a classical liberal political theorist. He published more than 150 works and experimented in several fields of science.
Wikidata · Photo: Ellen Sharples, Public domain
23
Scottish chemist (1852–1916)
Sir William Ramsay, the Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gases. He received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air"; in the same year John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, with whom he had worked, received the Nobel Prize in Physics, for their discovery of argon. Once the pair had identified argon, Ramsay went on to study other gases of the atmosphere.
Wikidata · Photo: Elliott & Fry, Public domain
24
Russian Romantic composer, physician, and chemist (1833–1887)
Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin, a Russian chemist and Romantic composer, of Georgian–Russian parentage. He was among the prominent 19th-century composers called "The Five", a group devoted to creating a "uniquely Russian" kind of classical music.
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25
German chemist (1852–1919)
Hermann Emil Louis Fischer, a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1902. He discovered the esterification reaction named after him.
26
English natural philosopher, and scientist (1731–1810)
An English physicist and chemist, both experimental and theoretical. He is known for discovering hydrogen, which he called "inflammable air".
Wikidata · Photo: George Wilson, Public domain
27
German chemist and philosopher (1853–1932)
Wilhelm Friedrich Ostwald, a Baltic German philosopher and chemist. Together with Svante Arrhenius, Walther Nernst and Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, he is credited as a founder of physical chemistry.
Wikidata · Photo: Nobel Foundation, Public domain
28
Israeli chemist (1939–2026)
Ada Esther Yonath, a crystallographer from Israel who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, known above all for pioneering work on how ribosomes are structured. At the Weizmann Institute of Science she directed the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center, devoted to the structure and assembly of biomolecules.
Wikidata · Photo: Hareesh N. Nampoothiri, CC BY-SA 3.0
29
Swedish chemist (1779–1848)
A Swedish chemist, counted with Antoine Lavoisier, John Dalton and Robert Boyle among the founders of modern chemistry.
30
Czech-American biochemist (1896–1957)
Gerty Theresa Cori, a Czech and American biochemist. In 1947 she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the first woman to receive it and only the third to win any science Nobel, for her part in the "discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen".
Wikidata · Photo: National Library of Medicine, Images from the History of Medicine, B05353, Public domain
31
British biochemist (1918–2013)
A British biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry two times.
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32
American biochemist and pharmacologist (1918–1999)
Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion, an American pharmacologist and biochemist. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1988 went jointly to her, Sir James Black and George H. Hitchings for developing new drugs through innovative methods of rational drug design, an approach built on understanding what the drug targets instead of relying on trial and error.
Wikidata · Photo: GlaxoSmithKline plc, CC BY 4.0
33
German chemist (1803–1873)
Justus Freiherr von Liebig, a German scientist who contributed greatly to the theory, practice and teaching of chemistry, and to biological and agricultural chemistry; he is regarded as one of the main founders of organic chemistry. While a professor in Giessen, at its university, he created the modern way of teaching chemistry through laboratory work, and for innovations like this he is ranked among the finest chemistry teachers ever.
34
English radiochemist (1877–1956)
An English radiochemist and FRS who, with Ernest Rutherford, explained radioactivity as the transmutation of elements, which today is known to involve nuclear reactions. He also showed that some radioactive elements have isotopes.
Wikidata · Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
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35
American biochemist and Nobel laureate (born 1964)
Jennifer Anne Doudna, an American biochemist, a pioneer of gene editing with CRISPR who has also contributed fundamentally to genetics and biochemistry. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2020 was awarded to her and Emmanuelle Charpentier "for the development of a method for genome editing."
Wikidata · Photo: Duncan.Hull, CC BY-SA 4.0
36
German physical chemist (1864–1941)
Walther Hermann Nernst, a German physical chemist known for work in electrochemistry, thermodynamics, solid-state physics and physical chemistry. The heat theorem he formulated, named after him, helped lead to the third law of thermodynamics, and won him the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Wikidata · Photo: Smithsonian Institution, No restrictions
37
Hungarian biochemist (1893–1986), Nobel Prize winner
Albert Imre Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt, a Hungarian biochemist and winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He is credited with isolating vitamin C for the first time, and with discovering the molecular basis of muscle contraction and many of the parts and reactions of the citric acid cycle.
Wikidata · Photo: J.W. McGuire, Public domain
38
French chemist and physicist (1778–1850)
A French physicist and chemist, known chiefly for finding that, by volume, water is two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen; for two gas laws; and for his work on mixtures of alcohol and water, which gave rise to the degrees Gay-Lussac that many countries use to measure alcoholic drinks.
Wikidata · Photo: François-Séraphin Delpech, Public domain
39
German chemist (1860–1917)
A German chemist and fermentation expert, whose work on fermentation won him the 1907 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Wikidata · Photo: Nobel Foundation, Public domain
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40
German chemist (1811–1899)
Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen, a German chemist who studied the emission spectra of elements when heated. Working with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff, he found caesium in 1860 and rubidium in 1861.
Every Wikidata item that is a person whose occupation is chemist and whose field of work is chemistry or a branch of it, and that has its own English Wikipedia article, ranked by the number of Wikimedia sites with a page about it — Wikipedia's language editions, mostly, and sister projects such as Wikiquote. That counts how many communities independently thought it worth describing, and nobody can buy a place on it. The top 40 are shown.
Wikidata files these under this list's query, but they are not what the list is about:
Fetched from Wikidata on 2026-09-25. Each description is this site's summary of the entry's Wikipedia article, which its name links to: the wording is ours, the facts are Wikipedia's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. To correct an entry, correct it there; the next refresh carries the change.
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