Georg Witting
Witting, Georg (1897-1987) was a German chemist who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Herbert Charles Brown of the United States. They received the prize for developing compounds capable of producing chemical bonds useful in the manufacture of drugs and in other industrial processes.
Georg Friedrich Karl Wittig was born in 1897 in Berlin, Germany. He studied at the University of Marburg, earning a doctorate there in 1926. He later held posts at the Technical University of Braunschweig and at the universities of Freiburg and Tubingen. He was a professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1956 to 1965.
Wittig developed phosphorus-containing compounds that could produce chemical bonds useful in the manufacture of drugs and in other industrial processes. One of his major achievements was the discovery of a type of reaction, now called the Wittig reaction, that produces olefins (a group of chemicals used in the manufacture of plastics and synthetic fibers). Similar reactions were later used to manufacture other substances, including vitamin A.
Wittig received several honorary doctorates degrees. He also won the Adolf von Baeyer Medal from the German Chemicai Society (1953), the Silver Medal from the University of Helsinki (1957), the Otto Hahn Prize for Chemistry and Physics (1967), and the Silver Medal from the City of Paris in 1969.
He held honorary memberships in the Swiss Chemical Society, the Chemical Society of London, and the New York Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the Chemical Society of Peru, the French Academy, and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
Georg Wittig died in 1987.