Rolf Huisgen

Rolf Huisgen (; 13 June 1920 – 26 March 2020) was a German chemist. His importance in synthetic organic chemistry extends to the enormous influence he had in post-war chemistry departments in Germany and Austria, due to many of his habilitants becoming professors. His major achievement was the development of the 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reaction, also called the Huisgen cycloaddition.

Life Huisgen was born in Gerolstein in Rhineland-Palatinate and studied at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München under the supervision of Heinrich Otto Wieland. He completed his Ph.D. in 1943 with a thesis about a strychnine alkaloid. The Huisgen reaction is of paramount importance to the synthesis of heterocyclic compounds, such as vitamins, alkaloids and antibiotics. He was also a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was an Honorary Member of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker and the Chemical Society of Japan. He was awarded the Liebig Medal in 1961, the Lavoisier Medal from the Société Chimique de France in 1965, and the Adolfo Quilico Medal from the Società Chimica Italiana in 1987, among others. He received several honorary doctorates, including from the Free University of Berlin in 2010. Bernd Giese, , Johann Mulzer, Hans-Ulrich Reissig, and Ivar Karl Ugi.

Personal life His daughter, mathematician Birge Huisgen-Zimmermann, was born in 1946. He died in Munich on 26 March 2020, aged 99.

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