Ernst Otto Fischer

Inorganic chemist, born in Munich, SE Germany. He studied at the Munich Technical University, and spent his career there, becoming director of the Inorganic Chemistry Institute in 1964. Working independently, he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 for explaining how certain metals and organic substances can merge to form organometallic sandwich compounds.

Ernst Otto Fischer is a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work in the area of organometallic chemistry. During a period of study leave, towards the end of 1941 he began to study chemistry at the TU in Munich.

He worked on his doctoral thesis as an assistant to Professor Walter Hieber in the Inorganic Chemistry Institute, His thesis was entitled "The Mechanisms of Carbon Monoxide Reactions of Nickel(II) Salts in the Presence of Dithionites and Sulfoxylates". After receiving his doctorate in 1952, he continued his research on the organometallic chemistry of the transition metal and. He was appointed a lecturer at the TU in 1955 and, in 1957, professor and then, in 1959, C4 professor. In 1964 he took the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at the TU.

In 1964 he was elected a member of the Mathematics/Natural Science section of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In 1969 he was appointed a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists, Leopoldina and in 1972 was given an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy of the University of Munich.

He lectured across the world on metal complexes of cyclopentadienyl, indenyl, arenes, olefins, and metal carbonyls. Among his many foreign lectureships, he was Firestone Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin (1969), visiting professor at the University of Florida (1971), and Arthur D.

He has received many awards including, in 1973 with Geoffrey Wilkinson, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on organometallic compounds.