Rudolf Criegee

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Rudolf Criegee (born May 23, 1902 in Düsseldorf , † November 7, 1975 in Karlsruhe ) was a German organic chemist .

Rudolf Criegee

life and work

Criegee's home was wealthy and his father was a court manager. The Criegee family was nationally liberal, Prussian and Protestant, which Rudolf Criegee found very lucky. His childhood was ended by the First World War , his eldest brother died on the Western Front in March 1915, and a second brother was seriously injured in the summer of 1916. Criegee himself was drafted as a young man at the end of the war .

After the turmoil of the post-war period, when he served in a volunteer corps , and passed the Abitur , he enrolled in chemistry at the University of Tübingen in the summer semester of 1920 . After four semesters and moderate academic success, but the experience from the Germania fraternity and twelve graduation courses , Criegee switched to the University of Greifswald . He stayed there for three semesters and took his first exam, after which he went to the University of Würzburg and received his doctorate in December 1925 under Otto Dimroth with a thesis on acridinium salts . Due to the death of his father in 1926 and a serious illness of his mother, she died in 1932, he suffered severe blows. Criegee stayed in Würzburg and in 1930 he completed his habilitation with a thesis on the "Oxidation of unsaturated hydrocarbons with lead (IV) salts".

Rudolf Criegee married his former fellow student Marianne Henze back in 1928. In 1932 he moved to the University of Marburg , where he received a senior assistant position with Hans Meerwein . In November 1933 he signed the German professors' confession of Adolf Hitler . In 1937 he got an extraordinary position at the Technical University of Karlsruhe , but his work was interrupted again and again by the Second World War and the two-time conscription for military service . In the summer of 1942 he was seriously injured on the Eastern Front , and his wife also died on February 10th. Criegee was released for research, but the institute was destroyed by bombs in the summer of 1944; in December he married again.

During the reconstruction he turned down several appointments at other universities and was appointed full professor in 1947, from 1949 he headed the Institute for Organic Chemistry. Rudolf Criegee continued to decline all calls to other universities. The new building, in which the institute has been located since 1966, was built under his leadership. Even after his retirement in 1969, Criegee continued his research until his death on November 7, 1975.

In his scientific work he mainly dealt with the oxidation processes of organic compounds, using lead tetraacetate and osmium tetroxide as oxidizing agents . The Criegee glycol cleavage with lead tetraacetate is named after him and is important in sugar chemistry. One focus was the investigation of the auto-oxidation of unsaturated cyclic hydrocarbons to peroxides . One of his great achievements was the elucidation of the mechanism of ozonolysis (1949) with the formation of ozonides . The Criegee Intermediate and the Criegee Rearrangement are named after him. Regardless of Robert B. Woodward and Roald Hoffmann ( Woodward-Hoffmann rules ), he had dealt with cyclical reactions and rearrangements in this context and had come to similar findings as Woodward and Hoffmann without publishing them in a timely manner. In the last few years of his scientific activity he investigated the chemistry of the small carbon rings, in particular cyclobutadiene and its derivatives .

Awards

Memberships

Works

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Willy Nolte (Ed.): Burschenschafter Stammrolle. Directory of the members of the German Burschenschaft according to the status of the summer semester 1934. Berlin 1934, p. 75.
  2. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Rudolf Criegee at academictree.org, accessed on January 28, 2018.
  3. ^ Rolf Huisgen : The portrait: Rudolf Criegee (1902-1975). In: Chemistry in Our Time . 12th year 1978, pp 49-55, ISSN  0009-2851
  4. ↑ a b G. Maier: Rudolf Criegee. 1902-1975. In: Chem. Ber. 110, 1977, pp. XXVII-XLVI. doi: 10.1002 / cber.19771100345
  5. ↑ Rudolf Criegee: Oxidation of unsaturated hydrocarbons with lead (4) salt. In: Liebigs Ann. Chem. 481, 1930, p. 263.
  6. ^ Rudolf Criegee: Mechanism of Ozonolysis . In: Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English . tape 14 , no. 11 , 1975, p. 745-752 , doi : 10.1002 / anie.197507451 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Criegee, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH 7th November 1975
Place of death Karlsruhe