Ernst Otto Fischer (November 10, 1918 –
July 23, 2007) was a German
chemist who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work in the area of organometallic chemistry.
He was born in Solln, near Munich. His parents were Karl T.
Fischer, Professor of Physics at the Technical University of Munich (TU),
and Valentine née Danzer. He graduated in 1937 with Abitur. Before the completion of two
years' compulsory military service, the Second World
War broke out, and he served in Poland, France, and Russia. During a period of study leave, towards the end of 1941 he
began to study chemistry at the TU in Munich. Following the end of the War, he was released by the Americans in the autumn of
1945 and resumed his studies, graduating in 1949.
He worked on his doctoral thesis as an assistant to Professor Walter Hieber in the
Inorganic Chemistry Institute, His thesis was entitled "The Mechanisms of Carbon
Monoxide Reactions of Nickel(II) Salts in the Presence of Dithionites and Sulfoxylates".[1] After receiving his doctorate in 1952, he continued his research on the
organometallic chemistry of the transition
metal and indicated with his lecturer thesis on "The Metal Complexes of Cyclopentadienes and Indenes".[2] that the structure postulated by Pauson and Kealy might be wrong. Shortly
after he published the structural data of ferrocene, the sandwich structure of the
η5 (pentahapto) compound.[3] He was appointed a
lecturer at the TU in 1955 and, in 1957, professor and then, in 1959, C4 professor. In 1964 he took the Chair of Inorganic
Chemistry at the TU.
In 1964 he was elected a member of the Mathematics/Natural Science section of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In 1969 he was
appointed a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists,
Leopoldina and in 1972 was given an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy of the University of
Munich.
He lectured across the world on metal complexes of cyclopentadienyl,
indenyl, arenes, olefins, and metal carbonyls. In the 1960s his group discovered a metal alkylidene and alkylidyne complexes,
since referred to as Fischer carbenes and Fischer-carbynes.[4] Overall he published about
450 journal articles and he trained many PhD and postdoctoral students, many of whom went on to noteworthy careers. Among his
many foreign lectureships, he was Firestone Lecturer at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison (1969), visiting professor at the University of Florida
(1971), and Arthur D. Little visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1973).
He has received many awards including, in 1973 with Geoffrey Wilkinson, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
for his work on organometallic compounds.
He died on July 23 2007 in Munich. [5]Fischer was, at the time of his
death, the oldest living German Nobel laureate. He was succeeded by Manfred Eigen, who
shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967 and is nine years younger than Fischer was.
External links
References
- ^ Hieber, W.; Fischer, E. O. (1952). "Ũber
den Mechanismus der Kohlenoxydreaktion von Nickel(II)- und KobaIt(II)-Salzen bei Gegenwart von Dithionit". Zeitschrifft
anorganische und allgemeine Chemie: 292-307.
- ^ E. O. Fischer (1955). "Metallverbindungen
des Cyclopentadiens und des Indens". Angewandte Chemie 67 (7): 211. DOI:10.1002/ange.19550670708.
- ^ E. O. Fischer, W. Pfab (1952). "Zur
Kristallstruktur der Di-Cyclopentadienyl-Verbindungen des zweiwertigen Eisens, Kobalts und Nickels". Z. Naturforsch. B
7: 377 - 379.
- ^ Fischer, E. O., "On the way to carbene and carbyne complexes", Advances in
Organometallic Chemistry, 1976, volume 14, 1-32
- ^ http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2972542
- C. Elschenbroich, A. Salzer ”Organometallics : A Concise Introduction” (2nd Ed) (1992) from Wiley-VCH: Weinheim. ISBN
3-527-28165-7
- Wolfgang A. Herrmann (2003). "Mediator between chemical worlds, aesthete of sciences, and man
of Bavaria: Ernst Otto Fischer". Journal of Organometallic Chemistry 684 (1-2): 1-5. DOI:10.1016/S0022-328X(03)00715-0.
- E. O. Fischer (1952). "Über Cycopentadien-Komplexe des Eisen und des Kobalts". Angewandte
Chemie 64 (22): 620. DOI:10.1002/ange.19520642206.
- olfgang A. Herrmann (2007). "Obituary: Ernst Otto Fischer (1918–2007)". Nature
449: 156. DOI:10.1038/449156a.
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