High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Rudolf Hoppe (born October 29, 1922, in Wittenberge, Brandenburg, Germany), a German chemist, discovered the first covalent noble gas compounds. Hoppe studied chemistry at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel and was awarded his doctorate at the Westfälische Wilhelms-University of Münster in 1954. He also got his habilitation degree in Münster and gained a professorship for inorganic chemistry in 1958. In 1965, Hoppe accepted an offer for the chair of inorganic and analytic chemistry at the Justus-Liebig-University of Gießen, which he kept until his retirement in 1991. Hoppe became famous through his synthesis of the stable noble gas compound XeF2 (Xenon difluoride), reported in November 1962. His work followed the previous synthesis of by xenon hexafluoroplatinate by Neil Bartlett, in an experiment run on March 23, 1962 and reported in June of that year.