Richard Adolf Zsigmondy
 |
Richard Zsigmondy |
Richard Adolf Zsigmondy (
April 1,
1865 in
Vienna,
Austrian Empire (now
Austria) -
September 23,
1929 in
Göttingen,
Germany) was an
Austrian-
German chemist of
Hungarian ancestry who studied
colloids. He won the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry in
1925. The
Zsigmondy crater on the
moon is named in his honor.
Already Zsigmondy was born to Irma von Szakmary and Adolf Zsigmondy Sr., who had been a scientist and had invented surgical instruments in the field of dentistry. He was brought up by his mother after his father's early death in
1880 and received a comprehensive education while nevertheless enjoying hobbies such as
climbing and
mountaineering with his siblings. In high school he developed an interest in natural science, especially in chemistry and physics and started to carry out experiments in his own home laboratory.
His academic career began at the
University of Vienna Medical Faculty, but soon moved on to the
Technical University of Vienna and later to the
University of Munich in order to study chemistry. In Munich his teacher was von Miller, where he started his scientific career in researching. He went back to Austria in
1893 to start as an assistant professor in Graz. During his work in Graz he accomplished his most notable research work, the work on the chemistry of
colloids (a certain coloured glass). In later years he worked on gold
hydrosol and developed the
slit-ultramicroscope.
His scientific career continued in
Germany,
Göttingen as professor for chemistry where he remained the rest of his professional career. In 1925 Zsigmondy received the
Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on colloids during his time in Graz.
He died only a few years after retirement in 1929 in Göttingen.
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Nobelprize biography
