Karl Ziegler

Karl Ziegler (1898 to 1973) was a German chemist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Giulio Natta for discoveries in the science and technology of polymers. Born near Kassel in central Germany, he studied at Marburg University, served briefly in World War I and took his doctorate at Marburg in 1920. His early interests were organic synthesis and physical organic chemistry, and during World War II he contributed to the German effort to make synthetic rubber. Later, at the Institute for Coal Research at Mülheim, he found that a catalyst could polymerize ethylene into very ordered, straight chain molecules, the basis of high density polyethylene.