Cornelis Adriaan Lobry van Troostenburg de Bruyn

De Bruyn studied natural sciences from 1875 until 1883 at the University of Leiden and obtained a PhD degree in chemistry in 1883. He worked as a scientific assistant, first in Leiden, then in Paris, and then again in Leiden. He then went on to work overseeing the Dutch navy's chemical laboratory for explosives. In 1896 he was appointed professor of organic chemistry and pharmacy at the University of Amsterdam.

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In 1897 he was invited to be a member of the Dutch National Academy of Sciences. He turned down offers of a professorship from the universities of Vienna in 1901 and Utrecht in 1902.

Scientific work

• He studied the three isomers of dinitrobenzene, setting the stage for the discovery of Meisenheimer complexes
• In 1885 he discovered tautomerism in sugars, now known as the Lobry-de Bruyn-van Ekenstein transformation
• He investigated alkaloids
• He synthesized hydroxylamine (1891) and hydrazine (1894)