Dmitri Mendeleev

As well as being responsible for the periodic table and doing extensive other research, Mendeleev got Russia to adopt the metric system. He studied under Bunsen and Kirchhoff in Heidelberg (much favoured by Russian students), and met Zinin and invited Borodin there. He also studied with Regnault, and met Dumas and Berthelot in Paris, and Liebig in Munich. Blok married his daughter Lyubov. Repin was among the artists he lectured to about colour chemistry, while the auto-didact Tsiolkovsky wrote and got his advice. If Turgenev didn’t meet him in Paris or in Heidelberg, he wrote about a notably similar man.