Johannes Wislicenus

Johannes Wislicenus (born June 24, 1835, Kleineichstädt, Thuringia [Germany]—died Dec. 5, 1902, Leipzig, Ger.) was a German chemist whose pioneering work led to the recognition of the importance of the spatial arrangement of atoms within a molecule. Wislicenus’s education included study at Harvard and Zürich, where he taught, prior to professorships elsewhere. He anticipated the structural theory of Jacobus van’t Hoff and Joseph-Achille Le Bel by several years in his work on lactic acid, which...