Due to the closeness of the Piloty family to the chemist Ludwig Knorr, who later married the sister of Oskar Piloty, he started studying chemistry at Adolf von Baeyer's laboratory at the University of Munich in 1888.

He and his colleagues speculated that he failed because he fell in love with the daughter of Baeyer; Piloty married her in 1892.

[1] At the University of Würzburg he worked with Emil Fischer on the chemistry of sugars, receiving his PhD in 1890.

[1] In 1891, they published the preparation of a novel unnatural sugar, l-ribose, by the epimerisation of L-arabonic acid and reduction of the resulting lactone.

[1] Although he was too old to be drafted for World War I, he fought at the Western Front where he was killed during a fight at the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915 near Sommepy.