Nobel Prize Recipient. Jaroslav Heyrovsky, an Austro-Hungarian Empire chemist, received worldwide professional recognition after being awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. According to the Nobel Prize committee, he received the coveted honor "for his discovery and development of the polarographic methods of analysis." Polarography is a type of voltammetry. In February of 1922, he discovered a method for analyzing the occurrence and content of various substances in solutions using electrical measurements. This discovery was published in a paper in England the next year. Within ten years, the measurement was commonly used. He was the first Czech to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Since 1940, he had received a total of 67 nominations for the Nobel candidacy. Although he received his award in the category of chemistry, he received eleven of the 67 nominations in the category of physiology or medicine. Born the son of a professor of Roman law at the University of Prague, he was the fifth child in the family. After graduating from local schools in 1909, he began his studies in chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the University of Prague. From 1910 to 1914, he continued his studies at the University College in London, under the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Sir William Ramsay, graduating with a B.Sc. degree in 1913. Going to England, he spoke a language understood by practically no scientist outside the Czech community. He was very interested in electrochemistry, working with Frederick G. Donnan, who encouraged his research. In the summer of 1914, he was on holiday at home in Prague from the university in London when World War I started. In 1915, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. During World War I, he served in military hospitals as a dispensing chemist and radiologist. He continued his studies during the war, earning his Ph.D. degree from the University of Prague in 1918 and D.Sc. from the University College in London in 1921. His Ph.D. thesis was on the electrochemical properties of aluminum. In April 1922, he accepted the post of assistant professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of Prague. After holding several posts at the University of Prague, he became the first professor and director of the department of physical chemistry from 1926 to 1954. In 1950 for one year, he was director of the Polarography Institute at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, resuming the position from 1952 to September 1963 and visiting frequently until his death. Since 1964, the facility was named the J. Heyrovský Institute of Polarography. In 1926, he had a six-month study at Urbain's laboratory at the University of Paris, and repeating another six-month study seven years later. In 1933 he made a lecture tour at Ivy League American universities with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. During the Nazi German occupation of Prague in 1939, Czech universities and laboratories were taken over by professors from German institutions, but not all of these professors were part of the Nazi Party. He and the German-Bohemian professor of chemistry with anti-Nazi views, Johann Böhm became colleagues, which allowed him to continue his research. Although Böhm remained at the University of Prague after the war and, a few days before his death in 1952, was elected corresponding member of the reorganized Academy of Sciences, Heyrovsky received criticism for their relationship. After the war, his homeland was isolated behind the Communist Iron Curtain. Besides the Nobel Prizes, he was awarded the State Prize, First Grade, in 1951, and in 1955 the Order of the Czechoslovak Republic. Among the long list of professional societies worldwide to which he belonged, he was granted in 1933 honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1927 a Fellow of University College in London, a fellow of the Royal Society in 1965, and President and first honorary member of the Polarographic Society in London. In his honor since 2014, the Jaroslav Heyrovsky Prize for Molecular Electrochemistry has been awarded by the International Polarographic Society. Since 1965, The Jaroslav Heyrovský Honorary Medal for Merit in the Chemical Sciences has been awarded by the Czech Academy of Sciences. He received honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Dresden in Germany in 1955, the University of Warsaw in 1956, the University Aix-Marseille in 1959, and the University of Paris in 1960. Besides his 1933 lectured tours in the United States, he had tours in the USSR in 1934, England in 1946, Sweden in 1947, the People's Republic of China in 1958, and in Egypt in 1960 and 1961. He married and the couple had a son and a daughter. By the time he received the Nobel Prize, his health had started to decline, which was related to the privations suffered during World War II, but his mind remained fresh and alert for any scientific questions. In the Pantheon of the Narodhy Museum in Prague is the bust of Jaroslav Heyrovsky. For over forty years as the leader in the knowledge of polarography, he concentrated on the elaboration of his original discovery.