The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Gerhard Ertl, professor emeritus and former director of the physical chemistry department at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany, “for his thorough studies of fundamental molecular processes at the gas–solid interface.” It’s the first time since 1999 that the prize has been awarded for work in physical chemistry, and the first since 1932 that it was awarded for the study of chemical reactions on surfaces.
Ertl was born in 1936 in Bad Cannstatt—now part of Stuttgart—in Germany. His early training in electro-chemistry, which deals with chemical processes at the solid–liquid interface, inspired him to start thinking about the chemistry of the solid–gas interface, a nearly unexplored field at the time. At the young age of 31, he became the director of the physical chemistry department at the University of...
