20th Century

Born: Kassel (Germany), 1898 
Died: Mühlheim-Ruhr (Germany), 1973 

Ziegler obtained a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Marburg (1920). He was professor at different universities and in 1943 he became director of the Max Planck Institute in Mülheim. In 1952 he made the discovery of the unique catalytic system enabling low-pressure polymerisation of ethylene to give linear polyethylene of high molecular weight. For this work he shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Giulio Natto