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Eduard Zintl Scientist

Eduard Zintl (January 21, 1898 – January 17, 1941) was a German chemist.After his family moved from Weiden and Bayreuth to Munich and after he had finished school he was drafted for military service during World War I. At the age of 21 he started studying at the University of Munich with Otto Hönigschmid. He got his PhD at the age of 25 with a thesis on the molar mass of bromine. He stayed with Otto Hönigschmid's group, where he was involved in the supervision of PhD students, for example Josef Goubeau and Günther Rienäcker. From 1928 till 1933 he was professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Freiburg. During this period he studied the structure of complex anions formed by metals in a solution of sodium in ammonia. [Na(NH3)x]+4[Pb9]4− is one of the examples he discovered.In 1933 he moved to a position at the Darmstadt University of Technology where a new building for inorganic and physical chemistry was planned and built. The research on complex anions lead him to the discovery of the Zintl phases. In the Zintl phase the structure of the Zintl ion (polyanion) should be similar to an isoelectronic element. For example in Na2Tl the polyanion is tetrahedral (Tl4)8− similar to the phosphorus molecule P4.