Adolf von Baeyer

Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer (31 October 1835, Berlin - 20 August 1917, Starnberg) was a German-Jewish chemist and university professor. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1905, for the development of organic chemistry through chemical dyes. He was ennobled by Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, with the hereditary title of Knight in 1885, which gave him the right to add the noble particle "von" to his last name, in recognition of his services to Germany.

Biography

He initially studied mathematics and physics at the University of Berlin before moving to Heidelberg, where he studied chemistry under Robert Bunsen.

He worked in the laboratory of August Kekulé, who exerted the greatest influence on his training as a specialist in organic chemistry, reaching his doctorate in Berlin in 1858. He was a fellow at the Berlin Trade Academy in 1860 and professor in Strasbourg in 1870. In 1875 succeeded Justus von Liebig as professor of chemistry at the University of Munich.

Scientific research

Among his many scientific achievements are the discovery of phenolphthalein, fluorescein and other resins that today form the basis of many plastics, derivatives of uric acid such as barbituric acid (1864) (the base component of barbiturates), and phenol-formaldehyde resins.

In 1872 he experimented with phenol, nearly discovering what Leo Baekeland later called bakelite.

But Baeyer is known, above all, for having achieved, in the early months of 1880 and after more than seventeen years of research with dyes, the synthesis of indigo, also known as indigo, and having determined its molecular structure in 1883; but it was not until 1928 that the stereochemistry of the double bond was determined to be a trans and not a cis isomer as Baeyer proposed, by using X-ray crystallography.

For this work he received the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1881 and in 1905 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of organic chemistry using chemical dyes.

Since 1911, the Adolf von Baeyer Medal has been established and is awarded annually.

Your name is reflected in various "name reactions" such as the Baeyer-Villiger oxidation and Baeyer's reagent. There is also Von Baeyer's nomenclature in structural chemistry and Baeyer's strain theory (which awarded him the Nobel prize) of alicyclic compounds.

He was elected a member of several scientific academies, in 1884 of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and in 1885 a foreign member of the Royal Society.

In 2009, the von Baeyer crater on the moon was named after him

Eponymy

• The lunar crater von Baeyer bears this name in his memory.

Succession of Nobel Prizes

Predecessor: William Ramsay Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1905 Successor: Henri Moissan