Norman Haworth

Norman Haworth was born on 19 March 1883 in Britain and built his career decoding carbohydrates at the University of Birmingham. He worked out the correct structures of multiple sugars and created the Haworth projection, a method that flattens three-dimensional sugar molecules into two-dimensional diagrams still used in every organic chemistry course. His most celebrated achievement came when he determined the structure of ascorbic acid — vitamin C — work that earned him the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Swiss chemist Paul Karrer. He died on his birthday in 1950, sixty-seven years…