Ernst Otto Fischer

Fischer, Ernst Otto, 1918–2007, German chemist, Ph.D. Technical Univ. of Munich (TUM), 1952. Fischer was a professor at TUM (1954–57) and the Univ. of Munich (1957–64). He returned to TUM in 1964 and then spent the period from 1969 to 1973 as a visiting lecturer at a number of schools in the United States, including the universities of Wisconsin, Florida, and Rochester as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fischer won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Geoffrey Wilkinson. Independently, the two chemists identified a completely new way in which metals and organic substances can combine. The resulting materials, known as organometallic compounds, have practical applications as catalysts in industry and are also found in biological systems.