Portal:Chemistry/Selected biography/8

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff (1852-1911) was a Dutch physical and organic chemist, and recipient of the inaugural Nobel Prize for Chemistry. His first major findings accounted for the phenomenon of optical activity by assuming that the chemical bonds between carbon atoms and their neighbors were directed towards the corners of a regular tetrahedron. This three-dimensional structure perfectly accounted for the isomers found in nature (stereochemistry). He shares credit for this idea with the French chemist Joseph Le Bel, who independently came up with the same idea. He received the first Nobel Prize for his work on relating the behaviour of solutions to that displayed by gases.