Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (French: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier; August 26, 1743 - May 8, 1794), a French aristocrat, chemist, and biologist, was honored as the "Father of Modern Chemistry" by later generations. He transformed chemistry from qualitative to quantitative, named oxygen and hydrogen, and predicted the existence of silicon. He helped establish the metric system. Lavoisier proposed the definition of "element". Based on this definition, he published the first modern list of chemical elements in 1789, listing 33 elements, including light and heat and some compounds that were considered elements at the time. Lavoisier's contribution made chemistry in the 18th century more physical and mathematical. He proposed standardized chemical nomenclature and wrote the first truly modern chemistry textbook, Traité Élémentaire de Chimie. He advocated and improved quantitative analysis methods and used them to verify the law of conservation of mass. He founded the oxidation theory to explain experimental phenomena such as combustion, pointing out that animal respiration is essentially slow oxidation. These epoch-making contributions made him one of the greatest chemists in history. Lavoisier was a tax collector, so he had ample funds for scientific research. But because of this, he was guillotined and died during the French Revolution.