It was with great sadness that we learned on 28 February of this year that Heinz Hoffmann had passed away. With his passing, the Colloid Society lost a long-standing member and its former president (1987-1991), who was very active in the turbulent years of German reunification, working to ensure that scientists on both sides of the wall immediately came back into close contact. Heinz Hoffmann was an internationally highly respected scientist since the late 1960s who has made a wide range of contributions to the colloid sciences.
His scientific career began in 1962 with his doctorate in electrochemistry at the Technical University of Karlsruhe under Walter Jaennicke. The following postdoc took him to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he became familiar with modern methods of rapid reaction kinetics under Ernest Yeager and met his charming wife Claudia, with whom he spent the rest of his life happily. Fast reaction kinetics was also his point of entry into colloid science after his habilitation at the University of Erlangen in 1969. He used this method to study surfactant solutions and, in international collaboration, laid the experimental and theoretical foundations for our current understanding of the dynamic processes of surfactants during self-aggregation and at interfaces.
After moving to a professorship in physical chemistry at the newly founded University of Bayreuth in 1975, he quickly established a research group there that was dedicated to intensive basic research on surfactants. Very different questions in the field of colloid chemistry were investigated here, such as the structure and rheological behavior of worm-like micelles and vesicle systems, lyotropic liquid crystalline phases, the properties of layered silicates in solution, the formation of sponge phases (L3) or solubilization in surfactant systems with the formation of microemulsions or emulsions, to name just a few of Heinz Hoffmann’s diverse topics. Central to his research was always the combination of different experimental methods in order to gain the most comprehensive understanding of the systems under consideration and to ‘distill’ the most relevant properties from them. One of the hallmarks of his research was that, although it was initially basic research, Heinz Hoffmann always had possible applications in mind and thus also had a major influence on application-oriented issues. This approach led to him not really retiring from science after he retired from the University of Bayreuth but instead founding an independent laboratory where he continued to conduct application-oriented, industry-funded colloid research for many years.
His research work was honored with a number of prizes, among which the Nernst-Haber-Bodenstein Prize of the Bunsen Society (1976), the Lectureship Award of the Chemical Society of Japan (1998), the Overbeek Medal of the ECIS (2011) and, of course, the Ostwald Prize of the Colloid Society (1995) are the most important. Heinz Hoffmann was an internationally highly respected scientist who, in addition to his commitment to the Colloid Society, was also one of the founding fathers of the European Colloid and Interface Society (ECIS), as he was always very interested in international scientific exchange. He established Bayreuth as a center for colloid research, not least with the founding of the Bayreuth Center for Colloids and Interfaces in 2000, which he had worked hard to establish for many years.
Many of us will remember encounters with Heinz Hoffmann. He was always very interested in discussing open scientific questions and always showed great curiosity about the unknown. He enjoyed debating, was clear on the matter at hand, and was always concerned about scientifically correct interpretation. Those who came into closer contact with him could feel and appreciate his down-to-earthness, honesty, and generosity. His honest efforts to advance science were always reliable, as was his support for his environment, his colleagues, co-workers, and friends, whose concerns he always had an open ear for.
The Colloid Society has lost a highly esteemed colleague and friend, Heinz Hoffmann, but we will always honor his memory.