Kurt Heinrich Meyer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kurt Heinrich Meyer and Kurt Otto Hans Meyer (born September 17, jul. / 29. September  1883 greg. In Tartu ; † 14. April 1952 in Menton ) was a German chemist .

life and work

Meyer, son of the pharmacologist Hans Horst Meyer , attended the Philippinum grammar school in Marburg from 1892 to 1901 . He first studied medicine and then chemistry in Marburg (represented by Theodor Zincke ) and Leipzig , but also in Freiburg , London and Munich . In Leipzig Meyer was in 1907 with the dissertation research on halochromism at Arthur Hantzsch doctorate . Then, at the request of his father, he went to England to supplement and expand his training, to work for several months in Ernest Rutherford's laboratory. After his return in 1911 , he completed his habilitation with Adolf von Baeyer in Munich on the determination of the equilibrium of the keto-enol tautomerism of acetoacetic ester and the determination of the enol content in keto-enol tautomeric equilibria by bromine titration ( about keto-enol tautomerism ). The Meyer-Schuster rearrangement is named after him and the Meyer back-titration method goes back to him.

In the First World War Meyer served as an artillery officer from 1914, but in 1917 he was appointed to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin to do research with Fritz Haber . After the war he worked at the University of Munich under the direction of Richard Willstätter . After a few more years at the university, he moved to BASF AG in Ludwigshafen am Rhein in 1921 , where he was appointed director of the research laboratories. Here he devoted himself to the chemistry of high polymers , in collaboration with Hermann F. Mark , whom he had brought to his institute.

In 1932 he left this post and was appointed professor of organic and inorganic chemistry at the University of Geneva . One of his long-time employees was later there, AJA van der Wyk . Among his numerous students and assistants was Edmond Henri Fischer , who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Medicine . Fischer's doctoral thesis dealt with the isolation and purification of alpha-amylase , confirming that it is a protein and not a polysaccharide .

Meyer died unexpectedly in 1952 while on vacation in Menton . His son, Horst Meyer , studied at the Universities of Geneva and Zurich and has been a physics professor at Duke University since 1959 - retired since 2005 .

Works (selection)

First detailed textbook on polymer chemistry:

  • Kurt H. Meyer, Hermann F. Mark : High polymer chemistry . A teaching and handbook for chemists and biologists. 1st edition. tape 1 : General basics of high polymer chemistry; tape 2 : The high polymer compounds. Academic publishing company Becker & Erler, Leipzig 1940 (345 + 679 pages).
  • Kurt H. Meyer, Hermann F. Mark; Antoine van der Wyk (AJA van der Wyk): Macromolecular Chemistry . A teaching and handbook for chemists and biologists. 3. Edition. Academic publishing company Geest & Portig, Leipzig 1953 (1023 pages).
  • Kurt H. Meyer: To the knowledge of the anthracene . I. About Anthranol and Anthrahydroquinone. In: Justus Liebig's Annals of Chemistry . tape 379 , no. 1 , 1911, ISSN  0170-2041 , p. 37-78 , doi : 10.1002 / jlac.19113790104 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Baptismal register of the university parish in Dorpat. Saaga, accessed March 9, 2014 (Estonian: Tartu ülikooli kogudus).
  2. biographical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Kurt Heinrich Meyer at academictree.org, accessed on 2 January of 2019.
  3. Louis Fieser, Mary Fieser: Organic chemistry . 2nd Edition. Verlag Chemie , Weinheim 1972, ISBN 3-527-25075-1 , p. 480 .