Ivar Ugi: An Exceptional Scientist and Human being. In Memorial Ivar Ugi

Ivar Ugi, a great scientist and exceptional human being recently left us. He died after a long and painful disease at the 27 September 2005. In memoriam Ivar Ugi this special issue of Heterocyles is edited with many contributions of his scientific friends and colleagues. He was born 1930 in Kuresare on the island Sareemma in Estonia. In 1941 the family Ugi left Estonia and moved to Dillingen an der Donau in Bavaria/Germany. There he went to high school. He studied mathematics and chemistry at the University of Tübingen. At the Ludwig Maximilian Universität in München he performed his PhD under the guidance of Prof. Rolf Huisgen. At the same university he performed his Habilitation “Isonitrile und Pentazole”. In 1962 he become married with his wife Helga and his son Ian was born. In the same year the family Ugi went to Leverkusen, where he joints the central research laboratory of the Bayer AG. Soon he became promoted to the “Research Director” and “Chairman of Bayer‘s Basic Research Committee”. During his time at Bayer Ivar Ugi and Otto Bayer became very good friends. However he realized that his managerial positions at Bayer mostly involved organisational work and prevented him from following his scientific ideas in the lab. Therefore, he was very lucky when he got a full chair for chemistry offered at the University of Southern California (USC) in the US. He stayed there form 1969 to 1971 and partially till 1973. In 1971 he moved back to Munich/Germany where he became offered the prestigious “Hans Fischer” chair at the Technische Universität München. In the line of his famous predecessors Hans Fischer, Stephan Goldschmidt, Emil Fischer and Heinrich Wieland, Ivar Ugi clearly was a worthy successor. He stayed there till his retirement in 1999. Ivar Ugi’s honors and awards are summarized in Table 1. When the Ugi family left Estonia in 1941 Ivar Ugi lost his mother tongue as time went by. However he learned again fluently to speak Estonian after he regularly visited Estonia after the fall down of the Iron Curtain. Moreover he was fluent in speaking Estonian, German, English, Russian and Polish.

Английский

Heterocycles. – 2007. – Vol. 73, № 1. – P. 1–11.