Wilhelm Ostwald was a renowned German chemist and one of the founding figures in the field of physical chemistry. He was born on September 2, 1853, in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire), and died on April 4, 1932, in Leipzig, Germany. Ostwald's pioneering work laid the groundwork for many areas in chemistry, including the study of catalysis, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909.
