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General First nameRudolf
LastnamePummerer
GenderMale
CountryGermany
Date of birth1882-07-26
Place of birthWels, Upper Austria, Austria
Date of death1973-11-07
Place of deathSeehausen am Staffelsee, Bayern, Germany

About

The following piece was mostly translated and slightly adapted from the original German article on Rudolf Pummerer, which can be accessed here:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Pummerer

Born in Upper Austria, the son of the linseed oil manufacturer of the same name, and grandson of Anton Georg Pummerer, Rudolf Pummerer first attended secondary school in Kremsmünster. After the family moved from Wels to Munich, he switched to the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich in 1896, where he sat the Abitur (secondary school leaving certificate) in 1900. His classmates included the future painter Hermann Ebers (1881-1955) and Karl Arthur Lange.

Pummerer subsequently studied chemistry at the University of Munich under Adolf von Baeyer, Heinrich Wieland and Johannes Thiele, and received his doctorate in 1905 under Richard Willstätter. From 1906, he worked as a laboratory chemist at the Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik in Ludwigshafen, and from 1908 as a private teacher at the state laboratory in Munich.

In 1911, after passing the qualifying examination for lecturing at a university, Pummerer taught as a private lecturer at the University of Munich. From 1914, he taught in the area of chemical technology. In 1915, after the outbreak of war, he was hired as an assistant chemist at the powder factory in Ingolstadt. In 1917, he worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, and from 1919 again at the University of Munich. From 1921, he was Professor of Organic Chemistry and head of the organic department at the state laboratory at the University of Munich.

In 1923, Pummerer was appointed institute director with the rank of full Professor of Chemistry at the University of Greifswald. From 1925, he held the same position at the University of Erlangen, and from 1931 to 1933 he was rector. In 1935, Emil Buchta was one of his doctoral students. (Pummerer retired in 1951 but continued to head the institute in Greifswald until 1952.)

His research areas were, amongst others, the chemistry of free radicals and sulfoxides, the results of which were published, inter alia, in the reports of the German Chemical Society in Berlin. In 1947 and 1948, Pummerer was also editor, and in 1949 and 1950, co-editor of the journal ‘Applied Chemistry’. Since 1937, he had also been editor of the ‘Collections of Chemical and Technical Lectures’. In 1940, he was appointed a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

He discovered the Pummerer Rearrangement, which to this day still bears his name. This is an organic reaction whereby an alkyl sulfoxide rearranges to an α-acyloxy-thioether (monothioacetal-ester) in the presence of acetic anhydride.

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