20th Century

Born: Hamburg (Germany), 1876 
Died: Kiel (Germany), 1954 

Under the guidance of Emil Fischer, Diels became professor in Berlin in 1906, in 1916 he moved to Kiel. In 1906 he synthesised C3O2. In the course of the investigation of cholesterol he found the dehydrogenation with Selenium. In 1928 together with Kurt Alder he developed a method of preparing cyclic organic compounds (Diels-Alder reaction) and the pair were jointly awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize for chemistry.