Alder, Kurt (1902-1958), a German chemist, shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1950 with Otto Diels for developing a method of synthesizing organic compounds of the diene group. Dienes are a type of hydrocarbon, a compound containing only carbon and hydrogen. See Hydrocarbon .
Alder and Diels gave their names to the Diels-Alder reaction, which they devised in 1928. In this chemical reaction, a diene and a compound with a double bond combine to give a cyclic product, a substance with atoms arranged in a ring. This reaction has proved important to the manufacture of plastics, to the petrochemical industry, and in synthetic organic chemistry. In the late 1920’s, Alder also researched into stereochemistry, a branch of chemistry dealing with the relative positions of atoms in molecules.
Alder was born on July 10, 1902, in Konigshutte, Prussia (now part of Chorzow, Poland). He studied chemistry at the universities of Berlin and Kiel, under the supervision of Otto Diels, with whom he later shared the Nobel Prize. Alder became professor at Kiel in 1934, and at Cologne in 1940. He died on June 20, 1958.
