Prelog, Vladimir

Prelog, Vladimir (vlädyē`mĭr prā`lôg), 1906–98, Swiss chemist, b. Sarejevo, Austria-Hungary (now in Bosnia and Herzegovina). Educated in Prague, he worked in Yugoslavia until the German invasion in 1941, when he moved to Switzerland to teach at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. In 1975, Prelog shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Cornforth for his application of X-ray analysis techniques to the determination of the structures of many types of complex organic molecules, such as antibiotics, and for formulating systematic rules that relate molecular structure to the properties of chemical compounds.