Sima Lozanić

Simeon Sima Lozanić
Portrait of Sima Lozanić, 1905
Born	(1847-02-24)February 24, 1847 Belgrade, Ottoman Empire
Died	July 7, 1935 Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia

Simeon "Sima" Lozanić (Serbian Cyrillic: Сима Лозанић) (1847-1935) was a Serbian chemist, president of the Serbian Royal Academy, the first rector of the University of Belgrade, minister of foreign affairs, minister of industry and diplomat.

Simeon Lozanić was born February 24, 1847 in Belgrade, Serbia. He completed legal studies in Belgrade, studied chemistry under Professor Johannes Wislicenius in Zürich and later with Professor August Wilhelm von Hofmann in Berlin. He earned his doctorate degree on March 19, 1870 at the University of Zurich. He was a professor at the "Great School" from 1872 and at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy until 1924.

When the University of Belgrade was founded in 1905, he was among the first eight full-time professors who selected the entire remaining academic staff. Sima Lozanić was then chosen as the first rector of the university. His 1905 opening ceremony words remained recorded as the following:

His chemistry classes paralleled, perhaps exceeded in some cases, those of the top European universities. They were organized with well-equipped laboratories and libraries, and produced some of the first chemistry textbooks. Lozanić himself wrote a number of textbooks, which covered various subject areas of chemistry: Inorganic chemistry, Organic chemistry, Analytical chemistry and Chemical technology. His textbooks were internationally renowned and in some areas groundbreaking. For example, Lozanić's Inorganic Chemistry textbook was the first European university textbook with Dmitriy Mendeleyev's periodic table of elements and one of the first containing a chapter on Thermochemistry. His Organic Chemistry textbooks are among the first books in which the compounds were represented by structural formulas.