Biography
Wallach was born in Königsberg, the son of a Prussian official. His father descended from a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism. His mother was an ethnic German of Protestant religion. Wallach's father was transferred to Stettin (Szczecin) and later to Potsdam. Otto Wallach went to school, a Gymnasium, in Potsdam, where he learned about literature and the history of art, two subjects he was interested his whole life. At this time he also started private chemical experiments at the house of his parents.
In 1867 he started studying chemistry at the University of Göttingen, where at this time Friedrich Wöhler was head of organic chemistry. After one semester at the University of Berlin with August Wilhelm von Hofmann, Wallach received his Doctoral degree from the University of Göttingen in 1869, and worked as a Professor in the University of Bonn (1870–89) and the University of Göttingen (1889–1915). Wallach died at Göttingen.
Read more about this topic: Otto Wallach
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)