Adolf von Baeyer

Synthesized indigo, ending centuries of dependence on the plant-derived dye and eventually undercutting India's natural-indigo export industry once BASF industrialized his process. He also devised the naming system for cyclic organic compounds that, extended over the following century, became part of the IUPAC nomenclature chemists still use. Baeyer won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the indigo work and his broader contributions to organic and dye chemistry, and had been ennobled by the Bavarian crown twenty years earlier.