science · 23 January 1876 · 148 years ago
birth
Born 23 Jan 1876; died 7 Mar 1954 at age 78.
Otto Paul Hermann Diels was a German organic chemist who with Kurt Alder was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1950 for their joint work in developing a method of preparing cyclic organic compounds. His most important work concerned the diene synthesis, in which organic compounds with two carbon-to-carbon double bonds were used to effect syntheses of many cyclic organic substances under conditions that threw light on the molecular structure of the products obtained. This method was developed (1928) in collaboration with Kurt Alder, his student, and is known as the Diels-Alder reaction. Their work proved especially important in the production of synthetic rubber and plastics.
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