Giulio Natta

Giulio Natta (1903 to 1979) was an Italian chemist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Karl Ziegler for discoveries in the science and technology of polymers. He chose chemistry and studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Milan, and after a series of appointments elsewhere in Italy he returned to his alma mater in 1938 as director of the Institute of Applied Chemistry. When he learned that Ziegler had polymerized ethylene catalytically he realized that similar substances such as propylene could be polymerized with catalysts, and in 1954 he made stereoregular polypropylene. The catalysts of the two men are known together as Ziegler-Natta catalysts.