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Chemistry: the central science
The real importance of Chemistry is that it serves as the interface to practically all of the other sciences, as well as to many other areas of human endeavor. For this reason, Chemistry is often said (at least by chemists!) to be the “central science”.

Chemistry can be “central” in a much more personal way: with a solid background in Chemistry, you will find it far easier to migrate into other fields as your interests develop.

The scope of chemical science

Chemistry is too universal and dynamically-changing a subject to be confined to a fixed definition; it might be better to think of chemistry more as a point of view that places its major focus on the structure and properties of substances— particular kinds of matter— and especially on the changes that they undergo.

In some ways, physics might be considered more “fundamental” to the extent that it deals with matter and energy in a more general way, without the emphasis on particular substances. But the distincion can get pretty fuzzy; it is ultimately rather futile to confine any aspect of human endeavour to little boxes.

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At the most fundmental level, chemistry can be organized along the lines shown here.

* Dynamics refers to the details of that rearrangements of atoms that occur during chemical change, and that strongly affect the rate at which change occurs.
* Energetics refers to the thermodynamics of chemical change, relating to the uptake or release of heat. More importantly, this aspect of chemistry controls the direction in which change occurs, and the mixture of substances that results.
* Composition and structure define the substances that are results of chemical change. Structure refers specifically to the relative arrangements of the atoms in space. The extent to which a given structure can persist is itself determined by energetics and dynamics.
* Synthesis, strictly speaking, refers to formation of new (and usually more complex) substances from simpler ones, but in the present context we use it in the more general sense to denote the operations required to bring about chemical change and to isolate the desired products.

This view of Chemistry is a rather astringent one that is probably more appreciated by people who already know the subject than by those who are about to learn it, so we will use a somewhat expanded scheme to organize the fundamental concepts of chemical science. But if you need a single-sentence”definition of Chemistry, this one wraps it up pretty well:
Chemistry is the study of substances; their properties, structure, and the changes they undergo.