The Nobel Committee recognized his "excellent work on organometallic compounds [which]...led to new polymerization reactions and ... paved the way for new and highly useful industrial processes".

One of many awards Ziegler received was the Werner von Siemens Ring in 1960 jointly with Otto Bayer and Walter Reppe, for expanding the scientific knowledge of and the technical development of new synthetic materials.

[4] His extra study and experimentation help explain why he received an award for most outstanding student in his final year at high school in Kassel, Germany.

[7] In 1933 Ziegler published his first major work on large ring systems, "Vielgliedrige Ringsysteme" which presented the fundamentals for the Ruggli-Ziegler dilution principle.

[7][11] He was also the president of the German Society for Petroleum Science and Coal Chemistry (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Mineralölwissenschaft und Kohlechemie), from 1954 to 1957.

[3] His daughter, Dr. Marianna Ziegler Witte was a doctor of medicine and married a chief physical of a children's hospital (at that time) in the Ruhr.

Maria, being an avid gardener, particularly enjoyed flower paintings by Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Oskar Kokoschka, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

As a young professor, Ziegler posed the question: what factors contribute to the dissociation of carbon-carbon bonds in substituted ethane derivatives?

[4] While still a doctoral student at University of Marburg, Ziegler published his first major article which showed how halochromic (R3C+Z−) salts could be made from carbinols.

His interest in the stability of tri-valent carbon free-radical compounds brought him to publish the first of many publications in which he sought to identify the steric and electronic factors responsible for the dissociation of hexa-substituted ethane derivatives.

He used strong bases such as the lithium and sodium salts of amines, to accomplish the cyclization of long-chain hydrocarbons possessing terminal cyano groups.

He discovered that ether scission opened a new method of preparing sodium and potassium alkyls,[11] and found that these compounds could easily be converted to the hexa-substituted ethane derivatives.

The nature of the substituent could be easily and systematically altered using this synthetic route by simply changing the identity of the ether starting material.

In 1927, he found that when the olefin stilbene was added to an ethyl ether solution of phenylisopropyl potassium, an abrupt color change from red to yellow took place.

His attempts were thwarted because a competing elimination reaction kept occurring causing an anomalous result: instead of ethylene being converted into a mixture of higher aluminum alkyls, its dimer, 1-butene, was almost the only product.

Ziegler and his student H. Breil found that salts of chromium, zirconium, and especially titanium did not promote the R2AlH-elimination but, instead, enormously accelerated the "growth" reaction.

Simply passing ethylene, at atmospheric pressure, into a catalytic amount of TiCl3 and Et2AlCl dissolved in a higher alkane led to the prompt deposition of polyethylene.

For their work on the controlled polymerization of hydrocarbons through the use of these novel organometallic catalysts, Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.