Top 5 chemists (qualification round)
I selected some chemists that may be included in the final top 5 ranking.
There are some rules for competitors.
1) The chemists have to be dead.
2) Borderline chemists are allowed, but non-chemists with a big influence on chemistry are not allowed, e.g. physicists like Bohr. (This will be another top 5)
3) Fame is not obligatory but it helps. A dramatic story behind the person can be advantageous as well (I included Karen Wetterhahn).
4) Alchemists are not allowed, so chemists from the Lavoisier-era are probably the oldest competitors.
You can nominate another chemist with a comment here or vote on your favourite chemists in the poll on the right side. (You can select more than one chemist.)
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15 comments:
I want to nominate Robert Burns Woodward (Np. 1965) "for his outstanding achievements in the art of organic synthesis".
I think it would be a great tragedy to not include Robert Burns Woodward. Studying his papers on the synthesis of Strychnine, Reserpine,Lysergic acid, Chlorophyll,to name but a few, Woodward opened up a new era of synthesis, sometimes called the 'Woodwardian era' in which he showed that natural products could be synthesized by careful applications of the principles of physical organic chemistry, and by meticulous planning.
How about Robert Bunsen? I can recommend reading about his work on cacodyl derivatives.
Oh and I guess Dr. Bunsen Honeydew isn't allowed....
I came in to point out that Woodward is missing, but I see that has already been noticed...
That is 3 votes for Woodward now. He will probably qualify for the final competition (excellent choice! Quite a miss I did not include him.)
I am not sure Robert Bunsen will make it, but who knows. Dr. Bunsen Honeydew is not dead enough.
What about Louis Pasteur?
I hesitated about including Pasteur at first because he is known as a microbiologists. But because of his discovery of asymmetric crystals and his thesis on crystallography he should be included indeed as a borderline chemist.
If you look through all the Nobel Prize winners there are so many more extraordinary chemists
(R. Willstaetter, K. Ziegler, G. Natta, Otto Hahn, Herbert C. Brown, Georg Wittig, to name a few I find important).
And these are onlt the Nobel Prize winners...
Glenn Seaborg
Other suggestions, not all top 5, but arguably top 10 or 15:
G.N. Lewis, Robert Boyle, Irving Langmuir, Baeyer, and Wallace Carothers
Don't forget Walter Stockmayer.
Grubbs. He isn't dead, though... (I could argue that, as a god, he is immortal...)
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