Prelog, Vladimir (1906-1998) was a Bosnian-born Swiss chemist who specialized in stereochemistry (the study of the spatial arrangement of atoms in molecules). He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Australian chemist John Cornforth.
Prelog was born on July 23, 1906, in Sarajevo in Bosnia (then part of Austria-Hungary) to Milan Prelog and Mara Cettolo Prelog. At the beginning of World War I (1914-1918), Prolog's family moved to Zagreb, Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia), where he attended high school. Prelog studied chemistry at the Czech Institute of Technology in Prague, from which he received a doctorate in 1929. He then worked for six years producing rare chemicals at the laboratory of a chemical manufacturer in Prague. In 1935, Prelog became a lecturer at the University of Zagreb. In 1942, he moved to the Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, where he was made a full professor in 1952 and laboratory head in 1957.
In the early 1930's, Prelog synthesized the chemical adamantane, a hard crystalline organic compound whose structure of carbon atoms is diamond shaped. Later, he focused on studying the structure of molecules. He used X-ray equipment to examine chiral (asymmetric) molecules. Working with isomers (two or more chemical compounds that have the same number of each kind of atom, but differ in the way the atoms are arranged), he created a system for naming stereoisomers. Stereoisomers are molecules that have atoms with the same connections but different spatial arrangements.
Prelog was awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. He retired from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology the following year.
Prelog was a member of the Royal Society of London, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He also received the Davy Medal of the Royal Society of London.