August Wilhelm von Hofmann

Hofmann was a research student in Liebig’s lab, working on aniline (which became tremendously important industrially and commercially). Perkins (the discoverer of synthetic mauve/purple dyes) was a research student of Hofmann’s in London, where he worked for two decades, and Crookes another; Stieglitz (so influential on 20th-century photography) studied under him in Berlin, as also did Haber. Hofmann has been described as the greatest of Liebig’s many notable students; his own father, an architect, designed Liebig’s enlarged laboratories.