Around the turn of the twentieth century, Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was responsible for organizing physical chemistry into a discipline distinct from organic chemistry. He wrote a basic textbook on the subject and co-founded a journal that provided physical chemists with a forum for their theories and experimental results. For his work in the measurement of chemical reactions, electrochemistry, and the acceleration of chemical reactions by the use of catalysts, Ostwald won the 1909 Nobel Prize for chemistry. He was also a prolific writer in both the philosophy and psychology of science, and he culminated a long academic career with valuable independent research into color theory.

Ostwald was born on September 2, 1853, in Riga, Latvia (now Estonia) into a family of master artisans. His parents, Gottfried and Elisabeth (Leuckel) Ostwald, were descendants of German immigrants; his father was a master cooper who had been a painter as a young man. The...