Wolfgang Helfrich was born on 26 March 1932 in Munich. From 1951 to 1958 he studied physics at the universities of Göttingen, Munich and Tübingen and received his doctorate in 1961 at the Technical University of Munich. After research stays in Munich, at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa with Dr. W. G. Schneider in the Pure Chemistry Division, and at the RCA (Radio Corporation of America) Laboratories in Princeton, Wolfgang Helfrich completed his habilitation in 1967 in Munich in experimental physics at the Physics Department of the TU Munich with Prof. Nikolaus Riehl on space-charge-limited and volume-controlled currents in organic crystals.

In 1967 Wolfgang Helfrich returned to the RCA Laboratories and began his groundbreaking theoretical work on the structure of liquid crystals. In 1970 he moved to the Hoffmann‑La Roche Laboratories in Basel and, together with Martin Schadt, built the first electro‑optical liquid‑crystal display (LCD) with a twisted nematic structure, which has been used in billions of devices for private and professional use. In 1973, Wolfgang Helfrich published the first complete theoretical description of the bending energy of membranes. In 1978, he proposed the first theory of the entropic repulsion of membranes arising from shape fluctuations. Over the following decades, he made numerous fundamental theoretical and experimental contributions to membrane physics, particularly on vesicle shapes, membrane shape fluctuations, and the effects of electric fields on vesicles.

In 1973, Wolfgang Helfrich accepted a professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin, which he held until 1997. For his achievements in developing the liquid‑crystal display and in describing membrane structure, Wolfgang Helfrich received numerous awards, including the Wolfgang Ostwald Prize of the German Colloid Society (1993), the Robert Wichard Pohl Prize of the German Physical Society (1996), the Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering (USA) (2012), and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics of Tel Aviv University (Israel) (2012).

Wolfgang Helfrich was a wanderer between theory and practical applications, who campaigned against purposeless research at universities and against paralyzing hierarchies in companies, and who, like no other, embodied thinking and researching in alternatives. He was an internationally celebrated pioneer in the study of the structure of liquid crystals and membranes, and he will be remembered by all colleagues and staff as a role model and source of inspiration.

Roland Netz (Department of Physics, Freie Universität Berlin), Thomas Weikl (Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam)