Richard Willstätter
| Richard Willstätter | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Richard Martin Willstätter 13 August 1872 Karlsruhe, Baden, Germany |
| Died | 3 August 1942 (aged 69) Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland |
| Nationality | Germany |
| Fields | Physical chemistry |
| Institutions |
University of Munich ETH Zürich University of Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute |
| Alma mater | University of Munich |
| Doctoral advisor |
Alfred Einhorn Adolf von Baeyer |
| Known for | Organic chemistry |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1915) Davy Medal (1932) Willard Gibbs Award (1933) Fellow of the Royal Society |
| Spouse | Sophie Leser (1903-1908; her death; 2 children) |
Richard Martin Willstätter, ForMemRS (13 August 1872 – 3 August 1942) was a German organic chemist whose study of the structure of plant pigments, chlorophyll included, won him the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Willstätter invented paper chromatography independently of Mikhail Tsvet.
Willstätter was born into a Jewish family in Karlsruhe. He was the son of Sophie (Ulmann) and Maxwell Willstätter, a textile merchant. He went to school there and, when his family moved, he attended the Technical School in Nuremberg. At age 18 he entered the University of Munich to study science and stayed for the next fifteen years. He was in the Department of Chemistry, first as a student of Adolf von Baeyer—he received his doctorate in 1894 - then as a faculty member. His doctoral thesis was on the structure of cocaine. Willstätter continued his research into other alkaloids and synthesized several of them. In 1896 he was named Lecturer and in 1902 Professor extraordinarius (professor without a chair).
In 1905 he left Munich to become professor at the ETH Zürich and there he worked on the plant pigment chlorophyll. He first determined its empirical formula.
In 1912 he became professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, studying the structure of pigments of flowers and fruits. It was here that Willstätter showed that chlorophyll was a mixture of two compounds, chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b.
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