German physical chemists

Richard_Willstatter

Richard Martin Willstätter FRS(For) HFRSE (German pronunciation: [ˈʁɪçaʁt ˈvɪlˌʃtɛtɐ] , 13 August 1872 – 3 August 1942) was a German organic chemist whose study of the structure of plant pigments, chlorophyll included, won him the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Willstätter invented paper chromatography following the initial description of the separation technique by Mikhail Tsvet.

Klaus_Clusius

Klaus Paul Alfred Clusius (19 March 1903 – 28 May 1963) was a German physical chemist from Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on isotope separation techniques and heavy water production. After the war, he was a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Zurich. He died in Zurich.

Walter_Noddack

Walter Noddack (17 August 1893 – 7 December 1960) was a German chemist. He, Ida Tacke (who later married Noddack), and Otto Berg reported the discovery of element 43 and element 75 in 1925.

Herbert_Freundlich

Herbert Max Finlay Freundlich (28 January 1880 in Charlottenburg – 30 March 1941 in Minneapolis) was a German chemist.His father was of German Jewish descent, and his mother (née Finlay) was from Scotland. His younger brother was Erwin Finlay Freundlich (1885–1964).
He was a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (now the Fritz Haber Institute) from 1919 until 1933, when the racial policies of the Nazi party demanded the dismissal of non-Aryans from senior posts. In 1934 he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.Emigrating to England, Freundlich accepted a guest professorship at University College London. Five years later, he accepted a professorship at the University of Minnesota. He died in Minneapolis two years later.
Freundlich's main works dealt with the coagulation and stability of colloidal solutions.
His most prominent student was Robert Havemann who became a well known colloid chemist of the German Democratic Republic.
His work is of continuing importance, with his 1907 paper "Über die Adsorption in Lösungen" (On adsorption in solutions) becoming highly cited at the beginning of the 21st century. This early paper was based on his habilitation thesis written in Leipzig under the guidance of Wilhelm Ostwald, and was heavily based on the work of Sten Lagergren.

Erich_Hückel

Erich Armand Arthur Joseph Hückel (August 9, 1896, Berlin – February 16, 1980, Marburg) was a German physicist and physical chemist. He is known for two major contributions:

The Debye–Hückel theory of electrolytic solutions
The Hückel method of approximate molecular orbital (MO) calculations on π electron systems.Hückel was born in the Charlottenburg suburb of Berlin. He studied physics and mathematics from 1914 to 1921 at the University of Göttingen.
On receiving his doctorate, he became an assistant at Göttingen, but soon became an assistant to Peter Debye at Zürich. It was there that he and Debye developed their theory (the Debye–Hückel theory, in 1923) of electrolytic solutions, elucidating the behavior of strong electrolytes by considering interionic forces, in order to account for their electrical conductivity and their thermodynamic activity coefficients.After spending 1928 and 1929 in England and Denmark, working briefly with Niels Bohr, Hückel joined the faculty of the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart. In 1935, he moved to Phillips University in Marburg, where he finally was named Full Professor a year before his retirement 1961. He was a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.