Joseph Le Bel's most famous contribution to chemistry was shared with another chemistry. Le Bel and Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff were both working on the same problem of light rotating power of compounds. Although they were students of Wurtz, they had little interaction with each other; each worked out the solution and published their findings essentially at the same time. Working against Le Bel's receiving primary credit for the discovery was the fact that van't Hoff published his paper shortly before Le Bel published his. However, van't Hoff produced no more papers about stereochemistry and left the field for physical chemistry shortly after the publication. Le Bel, on the other hand, conducted research in stereochemistry for the remainder of his career.

Le Bel was born in 1847 into a family who made a fortune in petroleum. As a young man, he was involved in his family's business and attended...