Emil Fischer

Hermann Emil Louis Fischer was born 9 October 1852 in Germany, though he dropped the Hermann and went by Emil his entire life. He worked in chemistry at a time when no one could easily draw the three-dimensional twist of carbon atoms, so he invented the Fischer projection - a flat symbolic notation that became standard. He discovered Fischer esterification, a fundamental reaction still taught in every organic chemistry course. In 1902 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Along the way he proposed the lock-and-key mechanism: the idea that enzymes and substrates fit together with physical precision, which reframed how biochemists thought about molecular recognition. He died 15 July 1919.