About Oskar Jeger

Oskar Jeger was born on July 24, 1917 in Lwów/Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), which at that time belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy and after World War I fell to Poland. Jeger attended elementary school and high school in this city, where he passed his school-leaving exams in 1935. He then enrolled in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the Johann Casimir University (now the National Ivan Franko University) in Lvov. From 1936, he studied chemistry at the ETH Zurich and graduated as an engineer-chemist in 1940. He obtained his doctorate under Leopold Ružička; his dissertation entitled "external page Contribution to the knowledge of triterpenes of the β-amyrin type" was published in 1946. From the summer semester of 1950 to 1957 he was a private lecturer in the field of special organic chemistry. In 1956 he was awarded the title of professor. From 1957 to 1965 he was associate professor, and from 1965 until his retirement in 1985 he held the full professorship in Chemistry of natural organic substances. From 1970 to 1972 he was head of the then University Department IV of Chemistry. He participated in the establishment of the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry (LOC) and acted as its head for several years. In 1971, he was named an honorary member of the Mexican Chemical Society. For his doctoral supervisor Ružička, he wrote an external page obituary published in Helvetica Chimica Acta after his death in 1976, together with Vladimir Prelog. Jeger died on September 14, 2002, at the age of 85.