Jacobus Henricus Van't HoffBorn 30 Aug 1852; died 1 Mar 1911 at age 58. Dutch physical chemist who was the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1901) “in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions.” In stereochemistry, in 1874, he identified the four chemical bonds of carbon as having a tetrahedral arrangement, which explained how certain moleculars can be arranged differently with the same atoms to give left- and right-handed isomers. (Achille Bel arrived independently at the same conclusion at about the same time.) With regard to the osmotic pressure of liquids, he derived laws (1886) for dilute solutions similar to the gas laws for gases by Robert Boyle and Joseph Gay-Lussac. These relationships enabled the experimental determination of the molecular weight of a substance in solution.« |
