A chemist, Wichterle is best known as the inventor of the soft contact lens (which one death notice says he accomplished in 1956, another puts at 1961). It may have taken him a while: his career was interrupted by the Nazis in 1942, who imprisoned him for two years, and by the Soviet invasion of 1968.
But he retired victorious: he was appointed president of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1990 and, after it was renamed the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, he was named its honorary chairman in 1993. Wichterle died August 18 at age 84.