Lothar Meyer

Julius Lothar Meyer was a German chemist, born in Varel, then part of the Duchy of Oldenburg, on 19 August 1830, who was one of the pioneers in developing the earliest versions of the periodic table of the chemical elements. He never used his first given name and was known simply as Lothar Meyer. The son of a physician, he attended the Altes Gymnasium in Oldenburg, studied medicine at the University of Zurich in 1851 and pathology at the University of Würzburg as a student of Rudolf Virchow, and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine from Würzburg in 1854. He then went to Heidelberg University, where Robert Bunsen held the chair of chemistry, and later studied mathematical physics at the University of Königsberg. In 1876 he became Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tübingen, and in 1882 both he and his chief rival Dmitri Mendeleev received the Davy Medal from the Royal Society for their work on the Periodic Law.