Herbert Freundlich

Born Jan. 28, 1880, in Berlin-Charlottenburg; died Mar. 31, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minn. German physical chemist.

Freundlich taught at the University of Leipzig after graduating from there in 1903. From 1911 to 1916 he was a professor at the Braunschweig Technische Hochschule, and beginning in 1916, he worked at the Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin. He moved to Great Britain in 1933 and then to the United States, where he was a professor at the University of Minnesota.

Freundlich’s main works deal with the coagulation and stability of colloidal solutions. He also investigated the important, from the scientific and practical standpoint, phenomenon of thixo-tropic gelatination, which he called thixotropy, and worked out a number of problems of colloid chemistry related to biology and medicine.