Rudolf Criegee was a German chemist

Chemist

A chemist is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties such as density and acidity. Chemists carefully describe the properties they study in terms of quantities, with detail on the level of molecules and their component atoms...

. He studied in Tübingen

Tübingen

Tübingen is a traditional university town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, on a ridge between the Neckar and Ammer rivers.-Geography:...

, Greifswald

Greifswald

Greifswald , officially, the University and Hanseatic City of Greifswald is a town in northeastern Germany. It is situated in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, at an equal distance of about from Germany's two largest cities, Berlin and Hamburg. The town borders the Baltic Sea, and is crossed...

, and Würzburg

Würzburg

Würzburg is a city in the region of Franconia which lies in the northern tip of Bavaria, Germany. Located at the Main River, it is the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. The regional dialect is Franconian....

 and received his doctorate at Würzburg in 1925. He proposed a reaction mechanism

Reaction mechanism

In chemistry, a reaction mechanism is the step by step sequence of elementary reactions by which overall chemical change occurs.Although only the net chemical change is directly observable for most chemical reactions, experiments can often be designed that suggest the possible sequence of steps in...

 for ozonolysis

Ozonolysis

Ozonolysis is the cleavage of an alkene or alkyne with ozone to form organic compounds in which the multiple carbon–carbon bond has been replaced by a double bond to oxygen...

 in 1953. The Criegee rearrangement

Criegee rearrangement

The Criegee rearrangement is a rearrangement reaction named after Rudolf Criegee. In this organic reaction a tertiary alcohol is cleaved in an organic oxidation by a peroxyacid to a ketone...

 is named after him. In this context, his research on cyclic reactions and cyclic rearrangement-mechanisms led him, independently of the Nobel-Prize winning work of R.B.Woodward and R.Hoffmann (Woodward-Hoffmann rules

Woodward-Hoffmann rules

The Woodward–Hoffmann rules devised by Robert Burns Woodward and Roald Hoffmann are a set of rules in organic chemistry predicting the stereochemistry of pericyclic reactions based on orbital symmetry. These include electrocyclic reactions, cycloadditions , sigmatropic reactions, and group transfer...

), to the same conclusions as theirs, but he failed to publish his findings in time.