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Vladimir Prelog [1906-1998]
Rank: 101
Scientist, Chemist


Vladimir Prelog ForMemRS was a Croatian-Swiss organic chemist who received the 1975 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. Prelog was born and grew up in Sarajevo. He lived and worked in Prague, Zagreb and Zürich during his lifetime.


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I was born on July 23rd, 1906, in Sarajevo in the province of Bosnia, which then belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy and later, in 1918, became part of Yugoslavia.
101
The period 1924 to 1929 was spent studying chemistry at the Czech Institute of Technology in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The supervisor of my thesis was Professor Emil Votocek, one of the prominent founders of chemical research in Czechoslovakia.
102
The close of my studies with a degree of a Dr. Ing. in 1929 coincided with the great economic crisis, and I was not able to find an academic position. I was therefore very grateful for a position in the newly created laboratory of G.J. Driza in Prague where rare chemicals were produced on small scale.
103
For many years, when still a Yugoslav citizen, I was already a Swiss patriot, and in 1959, I obtained Swiss citizenship. However, I consider myself a world citizen, and I am very grateful to my adopted country that it allows me to be one.
104
An object is chiral if it cannot be brought into congruence with its mirror image by translation and rotation.
105
Many objects of our three-dimensional perceptual world are not only chiral but appear in nature in two versions, related at least ideally, as a chiral object and its mirror image.
106
To grasp the essence of chirality, it is instructive to withdraw for a moment from the familiar three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional one, into a plane, and enquire what chirality means there.
107
A planar geometrical figure with more than three vertices can be decomposed into a set of triangles, and it can be reconstructed from a set of triangles.
108

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