🌻A great loss: Armin de Meijere passed away at age 86 on December 17 in Göttingen. Born in Duisburg, not too far away from the Netherlands, hence his Dutch name. His distinguished career spanned both the golden age of physical organic chemistry and the rise of transition-metal catalysis. De Meijere studied chemistry at the Universities of Freiburg @UniFreiburg and Göttingen, where he received his PhD in 1966 under Wolfgang Lüttke for spectroscopic and electron-diffraction studies. After a postdoc with Ken Wiberg at @Yale Univ., he embarked on his academic career: Habilitation (1971) and first professorship in Göttingen (1974) were followed by full professorships at the Univ. of Hamburg (1977–1989) before returning to Göttingen, where he remained until his retirement in 2006. De Meijere was famous for studies on highly strained polycyclic small-ring hydrocarbons, for developing new synthetic methods using cyclopropane and cyclopropene building blocks on the one hand and for transition metal—Pd in particular—catalyzed reactions on the other hand. He used such methods in the #TotalSynthesis of natural products and bioactive compounds. As early as 1976, his group reported a gold-catalyzed rearrangement, and soon after a photochemical trifluoromethylation—both notably ahead of their time. A plethora of fascinating three-membered ring-based molecules were synthesized, like polyrotanes and propellanes; acepentalene was first synthesized in his group, among many other achievements. De Meijere received numerous awards, including the Adolf von Bayer Medal of the GDCh @GDCh_aktuell. Around 250 PhD students and postdocs have lost an exceptional mentor—and chemistry has lost a giant.