Endre Berner

Who was Endre Berner?

Endre Qvie Berner was a Norwegian chemist.

He was born in Stavanger as a son of businessperson Endre Qvie Berner, Sr. and his wife Anna Marie Gjemre. He worked at a workshop after finishing middle school, and enrolled in machinery studies at Bergen Technical School in 1911, but switched to chemistry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1913. He graduated in 1918, and was then hired as research assistant of his advisor Claus Nissen Riiber. In 1922 he was promoted to docent. He studied in Munich in 1922–1923 and 1928, and in Birmingham in 1929. He took the doctorate in 1926 with the thesis A Contribution to the Thermochemistry of Organic Compounds. In 1934 he was appointed as professor at the University of Oslo. He is well known in the Nordic countries for his textbook Lærebok i organisk kjemi. The first modern Norwegian textbook in organic chemistry, it was first released in 1942 and then re-released several times, the last in 1964. The 1958 edition became known for introducing new Norwegian-language names of several chemical elements: hydrogen, nitrogen, karbon og oksygen.