Answer
1958 marked the passing of Kurt Alder, a renowned German chemist. His groundbreaking contributions to the field of organic chemistry, particularly his work on the Diels-Alder reaction, earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1950. This reaction, which involves the cycloaddition of a conjugated diene and a dienophile, has become a cornerstone of organic synthesis and continues to be widely used in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries.