Physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1963, for her ‘discoveries concerning the structure of nuclear shells’. Second ever female Nobel Prize winner.
Born in 1906 in Katowice. She came from a distinguished family of scientists in Silesia. Her father, Friedrich Göppert, a doctor and professor of paediatrics, contributed to the eradication of the meningitis epidemic in Katowice in 1905 and discovered an innovative method of combating the disease, her grandfather was professor of law Heinrich Robert Goeppert, her great-grandfather was professor of botany Heinrich Göppert , founder of the Botanical Museum in Wrocław, and her great-great-grandfather was professor of pharmacy . On her father’s side of the family, Maria became the seventh generation of university professors.
In 1910 Göppert-Mayer moved with her parents to Göttingen, where her father received the equivalent of today’s habilitation and a professorship at Georg-August Universität . It was clear to her parents that she would study at this renowned university after her school-leaving exams (1924), which was not common for women at the time. At first she wanted to become a mathematician, but after three years she changed her major to physics. In 1930, she obtained a doctorate in quantum physics. The importance of the university centre in Göttingen at the time can be seen in the fact that three Nobel Prize winners were present at her Rigorosum: her supervisor, Max Born , James Franck and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus. After marrying Joseph Edward Mayer (1904-1983), an American student and assistant to Franck, who later became president of the American Physical Society, she moved to the USA in 1930 where she gave birth to two children, Maria Ann Wentzel and Peter Conrad. Marianne would later become an astronomer and Peter a professor of economics.
From (1931-1939) she taught at Johns Hopkins University (where she became friends with Teller ) and later (1939-1946) at Columbia University. In the 1930s, she worked closely with Karl Herzfeld. In the summers, she would return to Göttingen where she worked with Max Born. During the World War II she was involved in work on the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. From 1946 she was a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago. From 1960 she was a professor at the University of California at La Jolla, San Diego.
Although she left Silesia in her third year of life and never returned there, she was involved, among other things, in helping Silesian refugees in the USA after World War II and supported the World Association of Upper Silesians in Pennsylvania. In 1967, she was in Warsaw to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marie Skłodowska-Curie. When the secretary for science at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Prof. Henryk Jablonski, asked her if she had any special wishes, she answered without hesitation that she wanted to see Katowice. She did not see it.
She died of a heart attack in 1972 and was buried in El Camino Memorial Park cemetery in San Diego.
source: https://www.szkolnictwo.pl/szukaj,Maria_G%C3%B6ppert-Mayer
Physicist, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1943 “In recognition of his contribution to the development of the molecular beam method and his discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton”.
He was born in 1888 in Zory. He was the grandson of a wealthy Jewish merchant, owner of a Zory mill, Abraham Stern, and the son of Oskar Stern and Eugenia (née Rosenthal). In 1892, the Sterns moved to Wrocław. After completing primary school, Otto Stern continued his education at the Johannes-Gymnasium in Breslau and then took up university studies in Freiburg, Munich and Wrocław. He received his doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Wrocław in 1912. After his doctorate that year, he followed Albert Einstein to the Charles University in Prague, and the following year to the Zurich University of Technology. During the years of the World War I, from August 1914 until its end, he served in various technical units of the Prussian army. After the defeat of Prussia, he returned to Frankfurt, where he continued his scientific work. He received his postdoctoral degree in Frankfurt in 1915 and worked with Max from 1919 onwards.
In 1921 he was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rostock. Due to his partial Jewish origin, he emigrated to the USA after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. By 1945, he was a professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. There, he set about building a molecular laboratory, although due to economic difficulties, he was not able to expand his laboratory to the same level as the one in Hamburg. Later, as professor emeritus, he settled at the University of California at Berkeley. He occasionally maintained contact with local physicists, but avoided public appearances. He died in 1969 in Berkeley, where he was buried.
Professor of chemical sciences, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1950 for his discovery and research on coordinated reactions involving dienes.
He was born in 1902 in Königshütte (now Chorzow). Kurt’s parents had a peasant background. His father occupied the position of an appointed teacher, first at primary school No. III and then No. V in Königshütte. He spent his youth in Chorzów. He started his school education on 1 April 1908 at the men’s comprehensive school No. V, where his father taught, and then at the Higher Real School with a mathematical and natural sciences profile. The Alder family lived in Königsberg during the Silesian uprisings and the plebiscite. After Kurt passed his secondary school leaving examinations, due to the division of the Prussian province of Silesia, the family moved to Berlin, where he began his studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. After the winter semester, they moved to Kiel, where Alder continued his studies at the Christian Albrecht University and graduated in 1924. His scientific advances brought him to the attention of Otto Diels, the then director of the Institute of Chemistry. At the time, Diels was conducting research into the addition reaction of azodicarboxylic acid esters to unsaturated compounds. Alder crowned his research under the supervision of Diels with a doctoral thesis entitled “On the cause and course of the azodicarboxylic acid ester reaction”, which he defended on 24 July 1926. The thesis was honoured and published in print in the Leipzig scientific publishing house and dedicated to his parents. Kurt Alder joined Otto Diels’ research team on a permanent basis.
From the beginning of 1927, he worked under the supervision of Otto Diels on the pericyclic reactions of unsaturated hydrocarbons. They published their first research results in 1928 in the Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie. This publication first introduced the concept of diene synthesis, now known as the Diels-Alder reaction, the first example of a chemical process occurring with a coordinated cycloaddition mechanism. In total, he published more than 150 scientific papers on the subject.
In 1930, he was habilitated at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kiel, thus gaining the right to give university lectures. He took up the post of Privatdozent. On 15 September 1934, Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring appointed him associate professor. In December 1936 he became head of the laboratory at the IG Farben plant in Leverkusen, where he worked on the synthetic rubber “Buna”. In 1940 he took over the Chair of Experimental Chemistry and Chemical Technology at the University of Cologne and the position of Director of the Institute of Chemistry at this university.
In 1949/1950 he served as Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 1955, he attended the meeting of German Nobel Prize winners in Lindau on Lake Constance, which was organised on the initiative of Count Bernadotte. The Lindau Manifesto, calling for a ban on nuclear weapons, was adopted at this meeting. He died in 1958 in Cologne. In 1979, one of the craters on the Moon was officially named ‘Alder’ in honour of Kurt Alder. In 2006, the accompanying crater was named “Alder E”.
Biochemist, winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his research on combating and preventing atherosclerosis , in particular for his discovery of the course of cholesterol synthesis in the human body.
He was born in 1912 in Nysa. He studied at the Munich University of Technology and was forced to leave Germany in 1934 due to Hitler’s rise to power. He took refuge in Switzerland and in 1936 left for the United States. He defended his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1938 and, from 1941 onwards, taught successively at Columbia, Chicago and Harvard Universities. In 1946, he was offered the position of associate professor at the University of Chicago. Konrad Bloch’s entire scientific career and research in the United States was related to cholesterol. Here he was awarded the title of full professor in 1950. In Chicago, he worked on cholesterol synthesis in the most modern laboratory in the world. In 1954, he moved to Harvard University in Cambridge. He published the results of his research work in the 1960 work Lipide Metabolism. From 1966 to 1969, the Nobel laureate held the position of president of the biochemistry section of the American Academy of Sciences, and from 1968 to 1971 he chaired the International Union of Biochemistry. Many universities around the world awarded him honorary doctorates. These include Columbia University and Hokkaido University, as well as the university where he began his scientific career – the Munich University of Technology. He also received many foreign honours for his scientific achievements. He was a member of scientific academies in Japan, the UK, Australia, Italy and Germany. He retired in 1982.
He died in 2000, in Burlington, Massachusetts.
source: https://www.szkolnictwo.pl/szukaj,Konrad_Bloch oraz https://plus.nto.pl/zapomniany-noblista-z-opolszczyzny-kto-pamieta-o-konradzie-blochu/ar/11643315
