Manfred Eigen shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1967 with George Porter and Ronald G. W. Norrish for their combined work on fast chemical reactions. Whereas previously scientists had no means of calculating the rates of these reactions, Eigen discovered that high-frequency sound waves could be used to create pulses of energy in a chemical system. Observing the change as the system returned to a state of equilibrium enabled him to measure rates of reactions that lasted only a billionth of a second. Most of his long career has been spent at the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Göttingen.

Eigen was born in the town of Bochum in the Ruhr region of Germany on May 9, 1927, to Ernst Eigen and Hedwig Feld Eigen. He served briefly with an army anti-aircraft artillery unit at the end of World War II, then returned to the University of...