JOHN ULRIC NEF. 907 



JOHN ULRIC NEF (1862-1915) 



Fellow in Class I, Section 3, 1891. 



John Ulric Nef was born in Switzerland (Herisau) June 14, 1862, 

 but came with his parents to the United States as a very young boy. 

 He graduated from Harvard University in 1884, receiving the award 

 of the Kirkland Traveling Fellowship, which gave him the opportunity 

 to study chemistry at the University of Munich. In 1886 he received 

 the degree of doctor of philosophy at Munich. His chief teacher was 

 v. Baeyer and undoubtedly Baeyer's great work on unsaturated 

 valences in carbon derivatives was decisive in leading Nef to make the 

 study of the nature and activities of carbon valences his own life work. 

 But he had the fine courage, the critical judgment and the tremendous 

 capacity for ardent work — earmarks of his genius — to strike out on 

 independent paths and develop his own lines of thought. This was 

 shown already in his very first investigations (on the structure of 

 benzoquinone), undertaken at Purdue University where he held his 

 first chair in chemistry (1887-'89), and continued at Clark University 

 ('89-'92). His fundamental researches on bivalent carbon (as proved 

 particularly for the isocyanides and the fulminates) followed imme- 

 diately after his work on the quinones; it was started during liis stay 

 at Clark University and completed at the University of Chicago, to 

 which he was called in 1892 and where he remained, as head of the 

 department of chemistry, until his death on August 13, 1915. This 

 brilliant series of investigations brought to him immediate and widest 

 recognition as a bold and successful thinker : he became a fellow of the 

 American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1891, a member of the 

 National Academy of Sciences in 1904 and a member of the Royal 

 Society of Sciences of Upsala, Sweden, in 1903. He received the 

 honorary LL.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1915. 



Dr. Nef applied the new line of thought, thus developed, to the 

 study of the mechanism of many classes of reactions of organic com- 

 pounds and he was engaged at the time of his death in an exhaustive 

 investigation of the sugars from the point of view of bivalent carbon 

 reactions. His ideas have been used and found stimulating and 

 fruitful in the work of a great many other investigators and there is 

 little doubt that his view of the existence of bivalent carbon in iso- 

 cyanides, fulminates and similar derivatives is destined to form a 

 permanent part of the theory of chemistry. 



Julius Stieglitz. 



