Rikhter, Viktor

Rikhter, Viktor Iul’evich 

(also V. von Richter). Born Apr. 3 (15), 1841, in Dobele, in what is now the Latvian SSR; died Sept. 27 (Oct. 9), 1891, in Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland. Russian chemist.

Rikhter graduated from the university of Dorpat (now Tartu) in 1862. From 1864 to 1872 he was an assistant at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, and in 1873 he became a professor at the Novo Aleksandriia Institute of Agriculture and Forestry in what is now Puława, Poland. In 1875 he began working at the Breslau Institute of Agricultural Technology, where he became a professor in 1879 and director in 1890.

In his doctoral dissertation, A Study of the Structure of Benzene Derivatives (1872), Rikhter established structural formulas for disubstituted benzene derivatives and investigated the interconversions of these derivatives and the directing effect of sub-stituents. His Textbook of Organic Chemistry Based on the Chemical Structure Theory (1870) was published in Russian, as was his Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry Based on Recent Concepts (1874; 13th ed., 1910). Both texts, which contained a logical exposition of the views of A. M. Butlerov and D. I. Mendeleev, underwent many editions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and were translated into English, Italian, and German.

REFERENCE

Prausnitz, G. “Victor von Richter.” Berichte der Deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft, 1891, vol. 24, pp. 1123–30.

S. A. POGODIN