The Most Famous
CHEMISTS from South Africa
This page contains a list of the greatest South African Chemists. The pantheon dataset contains 509 Chemists, 2 of which were born in South Africa. This makes South Africa the birth place of the 32nd most number of Chemists behind Croatia and Australia.
Top 2
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary South African Chemists of all time. This list of famous South African Chemists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Michael Levitt (1947 - )
With an HPI of 60.27, Michael Levitt is the most famous South African Chemist. His biography has been translated into 52 different languages on wikipedia.
Michael Levitt, (Hebrew: מיכאל לויט; born 9 May 1947) is a South African-born biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems". In 2018, Levitt was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science.
2. J. L. B. Smith (1897 - 1968)
With an HPI of 37.91, J. L. B. Smith is the 2nd most famous South African Chemist. His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
James Leonard Brierley Smith (26 September 1897 – 8 January 1968) was a South African ichthyologist, organic chemist, and university professor. He was the first to identify a taxidermied fish as a coelacanth, at the time thought to be long extinct.
Pantheon has 2 people classified as chemists born between 1897 and 1947. Of these 2, 1 (50.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living chemists include Michael Levitt. The most famous deceased chemists include J. L. B. Smith. As of April 2022, 1 new chemists have been added to Pantheon including J. L. B. Smith.
