List of people whose names are used in chemical element names


Below is the list of people whose names are used in chemical element names. Of the 118 chemical elements, 19 are connected with the names of 20 people. 15 elements were named to honor 16 scientists. Four other elements have indirect connection to the names of non-scientists. Only gadolinium and samarium occur in nature; the rest are synthetic.

Table

The following 19 elements are connected to the names of people. Seaborg and Oganessian were the only two who were alive at the time of being honored with having elements named after them. The four non-scientists in this table are connected with elements that were not named to honor the individual directly but rather were named for a place or thing which in turn had been named for these people. Samarium was named for the mineral samarskite from which it was isolated. Americium, berkelium and livermorium were named after places that had been named for them. The cities of Berkeley, California and Livermore, California are the locations of the University of California Radiation Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, respectively.

Other connections

Other element names have been proposed but failed to gain official international recognition. These include columbium, hahnium, joliotium, and kurchatovium, names connected to Christopher Columbus, Otto Hahn, Irène Joliot-Curie, and Igor Kurchatov.
Also, mythological entities have had a significant impact on the naming of elements. Helium, titanium, selenium, palladium, promethium, cerium, europium, mercury, thorium, uranium, neptunium and plutonium are all given names connected to mythological deities. With these five, that connection is indirect:
Titanium is unique in that it refers to a group of deities rather than any particular individual. So Helios, Selene, Pallas, and Prometheus actually have two elements named in their honor.
And for elements given a name connected with a group, there is also xenon, named for the Greek word ξένον, neuter singular form of ξένος, meaning 'foreign', 'strange', or 'guest'.
Its discoverer William Ramsay intended this name to be an indication of the qualities of this element in analogy to the generic group of people.