Justus von Liebig

Justus Freiherr von Liebig was born on 12 May 1803 in Germany and became a professor at the University of Giessen, where he invented the laboratory teaching method that still shapes how chemistry is taught. He's considered a principal founder of organic chemistry, but his sharpest legacy came from agriculture: he identified nitrogen and minerals as essential plant nutrients and popularized the law of the minimum — the idea that growth is choked by the scarcest resource, not the sum of available ones. That framework earned him the title "father of the fertilizer industry." He also developed a p…