Vladimir Prelog
The 1975 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded to Vladimir Prelog, stands as the defining recognition of a career devoted to organic chemistry.
Prelog was born on July 23, 1906, in Sarajevo, a citizen of Austria-Hungary by birth. He attended the III Gymnasium in Osijek before pursuing his higher education at the Czech Technical University in Prague. A Croatian-Swiss organic chemist by identification, he held citizenship over the course of his life in Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and Switzerland. He also worked as a university teacher and as an engineer. He died in Zurich on January 7, 1998.
Over the course of his career, Prelog accumulated a substantial record of institutional recognition. He received the Davy Medal, the Marcel Benoist Prize, and the Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, a mark of standing within the international scientific community. His connections to the cities of his early life were honored in a different register: he was made an honorary citizen of both Osijek and Sarajevo, acknowledging the man alongside the scientist.
Prelog used Croatian and Slovene among the languages of his life, a reflection of the layered geographies his biography traversed. The Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry remains one of the named distinctions the chemical community conferred upon him, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, received in 1975, affirms the regard in which his work in organic chemistry was held.
Quotes by Vladimir Prelog
To grasp the essence of chirality, it is instructive to withdraw for a moment from the familiar three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional one, into a plane, and enquire what chirality means there.
The period 1924 to 1929 was spent studying chemistry at the Czech Institute of Technology in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The supervisor of my thesis was Professor Emil Votocek, one of the prominent founders of chemical research in Czechoslovakia.
The close of my studies with a degree of a Dr. Ing. in 1929 coincided with the great economic crisis, and I was not able to find an academic position. I was therefore very grateful for a position in the newly created laboratory of G.J. Driza in Prague where rare chemicals were produced on small scale.
Many objects of our three-dimensional perceptual world are not only chiral but appear in nature in two versions, related at least ideally, as a chiral object and its mirror image.
For many years, when still a Yugoslav citizen, I was already a Swiss patriot, and in 1959, I obtained Swiss citizenship. However, I consider myself a world citizen, and I am very grateful to my adopted country that it allows me to be one.
A planar geometrical figure with more than three vertices can be decomposed into a set of triangles, and it can be reconstructed from a set of triangles.
An object is chiral if it cannot be brought into congruence with its mirror image by translation and rotation.
I was born on July 23rd, 1906, in Sarajevo in the province of Bosnia, which then belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy and later, in 1918, became part of Yugoslavia.