Swedish chemist who discovered the elements holmium and thulium.

Cleve became assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Uppsala in 1868 and in addition taught at the Technological Institute in Stockholm from 1870 to 1874. He then was appointed professor of general and agricultural chemistry at Uppsala.

After extensive chemical investigations, Cleve concluded in 1874 that the element didymium was actually two elements. His theory was vindicated 11 years later by C.A. Welsbach's discovery of neodymium and praseodymium. In 1879 Cleve showed that the newly discovered scandium was the element previously predicted by D.I. Mendeleyev, who called it eka-boron. In that same year Cleve discovered the rare-earth elements holmium and thulium. His contributions to organic chemistry include the discovery of 6 of the 10 possible forms of dichloro naphthalene and the discovery of the aminonaphthalenesulfonic acids, sometimes known as Cleve's acids.

From 1890 Cleve concentrated on biological studies, notably on freshwater algae, plankton, and diatoms. He developed a method of determining the age and order of late glacial and postglacial deposits from the types of diatom fossils in the deposits. This use of diatoms for identification has also been applied to determining the origin of ocean streams, and Cleve's work on diatoms, The Seasonal Distribution of Atlantic Plankton Organisms (1900), became a basic text on oceanography.