Life
Oskar Piloty was born the son of the painter Karl von Piloty in Munich. Due to the closeness of the Piloty family to the chemist Ludwig Knorr, who later married the sister of Oskar Piloty, he started studying chemistry at Adolf von Baeyer's laboratory at the University of Munich in 1888. After failing an exam by Bayer in 1889 he transferred to the University of Würzburg. He and his colleagues speculated that he failed because he fell in love with the daughter of Baeyer; Piloty married her in 1892.
At the University of Würzburg he worked with Emil Fischer on the chemistry of sugars. He received his PhD in 1890. In 1892 he followed Emil Fischer to the University of Berlin. In 1900 his father-in-law offered him a position at the University of Munich, which he accepted even though he had a better offer from Emil Fischer. He worked on the structure of natural products such as hemoglobin.
Although he was too old to be drafted for World War I, he fought at the Western Front where he was killed during a fight at the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915 near Sommepy.
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