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600 BCE
Acharya Kanad
Acharya Kanad was an Indian philosopher credited with being the Father of Atomic Theory, proposing the atom, which he called Parmanu, nearly 2 600 years before John Dalton. Kanad also stated atoms of the same substance combined to produce dvyanuka and tryanuka, diatomic and triatomic molecules respectively. -
Marie Sklodowska Curie
Marie Curie was a Polish physicist who is best known for her joint 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, for their work on radioactivity, which included isolating polonium and radium, as well as developing methods for isolating radium in sufficient quantities as to study its properties in-depth. -
Hantaro Nagaoka
Hamtaro Nagaoka was a Japanese physicist who created the "Saturnian" model of the atom, which postulated that the atom was inherently unstable and that the electron would slowly lose energy by radiating continuously and spiral into the nucleus. -
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who's contributions to Atomic Theory most prominently include being the first to isolate protactinium-231 along with her partner Otto Hahn and for her part in discovered nuclear fission, although Hahn received the Nobel Prize. -
Ronald Gillespie
Ronald Gillespie's contributions to Atomic Theory since 1924 include the VSEPR model (Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion) and LCP Theory (Ligand Close Packing). -
Satyendra Nath Bose
Satyendra Nath Bose's contributions to Atomic Theory most prominently include his collaboration with Einstein in developing Bost-Einstein Statistics for handline bosons and discovering the Bose-Einstein Condensate, sometimes called the fifth state of matter -
Irène Joliot-Curie
Irène Curie, the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie, is best known in the scientific field for her joint 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, for their work on synthesizing new radioactive elements. Irène also did crucial work on the actions of neutrons in heavy elements, which ultimately led to the discovery of uranium fission. -
Hideki Yukawa
Hideki Yukawa was a Japanese physicist who is best known for his 1949 Nobel Prize for predicting the existence of the pi meson, or the pion, a hadron consisting of a quark and an anti-quark. -
Richar Bader
Richar Bader discovered between 1931 and 2012 that electron density was crucially important to explaining the behaviour of atoms and that there were no orbitals in molecules. -
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Dorothy Hodgkin was a British chemist who is best known for her 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on X-Ray Crystallography which allowed her to determine the structure of biomolecules, which would later become a cornerstone of structural biology. -
Robert J. LeRoy
LeRoy contributions to Atomic Theory between 1965 - 2018 included the LeRoy Radius (the internuclear distance at which the LeRoy-Bernstein becomes valid) and the LeRoy-Bernstein Theory, which describes vibrational energy levels near the dissociation limit of molecules. -
Henry Taube
Henry Taube's contributions to Atomic Theory most notably include a Nobel Prize for "for his work on the mechanisms of electron transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes."
