1967 - Cyril Norman Hinshelwood died.

Hinshelwood was a British chemist who was awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize with Nikolay Nikolaevich Semenov for their work on the mechanisms of chemical reactions. Hinshelwood investigated the rates and mechanism of chain reactions such as the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen to form water. His later work was on the chemical changes that occur on bacterial cell walls that were important to future antibiotic research.

1943 - Pieter Zeeman died.

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Zeeman was a Dutch physicist who shares the 1902 Nobel Prize with Hendrik Lorentz for the discovery of the Zeeman effect. The Zeeman effect is the splitting of spectral lines when a magnetic field is applied and demonstrates the angular momentum quantum number.

1933 - Peter Mansfield was born.

Mansfield is a British physicist who shares the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Paul C. Lauterbur for their discoveries in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He showed how the radio signals from MRI could be analyzed mathematically to produce a useful image. MRI expands on the technology of nuclear magnetic resonance to produce detailed and high contrast images of the internal workings of the body. They typically give much better results than x-rays or CT scans.

1879 - Max Von Laue was born.

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Laue was a German physicist who was awarded the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of x-ray diffraction in crystals. This was the beginning of the field of x-ray crystallography. X-rays can resolve down to the molecular level to distinguish the distance between bonds of atoms. It is a valuable tool to determine structures of molecules. Today, with the help of computers, x-ray crystallography can determine three-dimensional structures of very large and complex molecules such as proteins.

1852 - Hermann Emil Fischer was born.

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Fischer was a German chemist who was awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into sugar and purine synthesis. Purine is the name for a family of organic compounds that are composed of a two ring structure of nitrogen and carbon atoms. Fisher coined the term purine and synthesized several purines such as adenine, xanthine and caffeine.

Fischer synthesized the sugars glucose, fructose and mannose for the first time. He also discovered the cyclic amino acids proline and oxyproline and identified the peptide bond that holds together amino acid chains.