I'm pretty sure that they will ask something about them. But you don't have to learn exact details. You only need to know brief things like their contribution to atomic theory. Here's a list of some:
Dalton - proposed that matter was composed of indivisible particles, which he called atoms.
Ramsay - discovered noble gases
Curie - discovered the elements radium and polonium and studied their radioactivity
Seaborg - discovered many trans uranium elements using a particle accelerator to bombard uranium with hydrogen nuclei
Soddy - confirmed the existence of isotopes
Meitner - demonstrated that barium is a product of neutron-bombarded uranium and proposed the term 'fission' for the process
Rutherford - used the gold-foil (alpha particle experiment) to propose the nuclear model of the atom in which electrons orbit a dense nucleus
Chadwick - identified the neutron as a particle that was neutral and contributed to the mass of the nucleus
Mendeleev - constructed a periodic table by:
> arranging elements with similar chemical properties into vertical groups
> arranging the elements in order of increasing atomic mass into horizontal periods
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