CHEMISTS from Australia

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Australian Chemists of all time. This list of famous Australian Chemists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. John Cornforth (1917 - 2013)

With an HPI of 59.34, John Cornforth is the most famous Australian Chemist.  His biography has been translated into 53 different languages on wikipedia.

Sir John Warcup Cornforth Jr., (7 September 1917 – 8 December 2013) was an Australian–British chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975 for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalysed reactions, becoming the only Nobel laureate born in New South Wales. Cornforth investigated enzymes that catalyse changes in organic compounds, the substrates, by taking the place of hydrogen atoms in a substrate's chains and rings. In his syntheses and descriptions of the structure of various terpenes, olefins, and steroids, Cornforth determined specifically which cluster of hydrogen atoms in a substrate were replaced by an enzyme to effect a given change in the substrate, allowing him to detail the biosynthesis of cholesterol. For this work, he won a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975, alongside co-recipient Vladimir Prelog, and was knighted in 1977.

2. David Warren (1925 - 2010)

With an HPI of 51.55, David Warren is the 2nd most famous Australian Chemist.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

David Ronald de Mey Warren (20 March 1925 – 19 July 2010) was an Australian scientist, best known for inventing and developing the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder (also known as FDR, CVR and "the black box").