Otto Diels

Otto Paul Hermann Diels was a German chemist who lived from 1876 to 1954. His most notable work, done with Kurt Alder, was the Diels-Alder reaction, a method for synthesizing cyclohexene compounds; the pair shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1950 for this discovery, whose method of synthesizing cyclic organic compounds proved valuable for manufacturing synthetic rubber and plastic. Diels completed his education at the University of Berlin, where he later worked, and was at the University of Kiel when he completed his Nobel Prize winning research, remaining there until his retirement in 1945. He was married and had five children.