Ludwig Wolff (1857-1919)

German chemist, born in Neustadt an der Haardt (Palatinate). He studied at Würzburg, Munich and Strasbourg and obtained his doctorate in Strasbourg in 1882 under Rudolph Fittig, with work on lactones. From 1891 until his death he was professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Jena, where he died in 1919.

He worked mainly on derivatives of levulinic acid, heterocycles (pyrazines, indoles, furazans), tetronic acids and diazo compounds. The two reactions that bear his name come from this last line of work: the Wolff rearrangement of α-diazoketones to ketenes and the Wolff-Kishner reduction, which he published in 1912, a year after Kishner and without knowing his work.