Hermann Emil Fischer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1902) for his work in determining the structure of the -aldohexoses. However, the linear, free-aldehyde structures that Fischer proposed represent a very minor percentage of the forms that hexose sugars adopt in solution. It was Edmund Hirst and Clifford Purves, in the research group of Walter Haworth, who conclusively determined that the hexose sugars preferentially form a pyranose, or six-membered, ring. Haworth drew the ring as a flat hexagon with groups above and below the plane of the ring – the Haworth projection.
A further refinement to the conformation of pyranose rings came when Sponsler and Dore (1926) realized that Sachse's mathematical treatment of six-membered rings could be applied to their X-ray structure of cellulose. It was determined that the pyranose ring is puckered, to allow all of the carbon atoms of the ring to have close to the ideal tetrahedral geometry.