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Geoffrey Wilkinson

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Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson
Born(1921-07-14)14 July 1921
Springside, England
Died26 September 1996(1996-09-26) (aged 75)
London, England
NationalityUnited Kingdom
Alma materImperial College
Known forHomogeneous transition metal catalysis
AwardsNobel Prize in Chemistry (1973)
Fellow of the Royal Society[1]
Scientific career
FieldsInorganic chemistry
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
Harvard University
Imperial College
Doctoral advisorHenry Vincent Aird Briscoe

Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson FRS[1] (14 July 1921 – 26 September 1996) was a Nobel laureate English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis.[2]

Biography

Wilkinson was born at Springside, Todmorden, in Yorkshire. His father, also a Geoffrey, was a master house painter and decorator; his mother worked in a local cotton mill. One of his uncles, an organist and choirmaster, had married into a family that owned a small chemical company making Epsom and Glauber's salts for the pharmaceutical industry; this is where he first developed an interest in chemistry.

He was educated at the local council primary school and, after winning a County Scholarship in 1932, went to Todmorden Grammar School. His physics teacher there, Luke Sutcliffe, had also taught Sir John Cockcroft, who received a Nobel Prize for "splitting the atom".

Wilkinson's catalyst RhCl(PPh3)3

In 1939 he obtained a Royal Scholarship for study at Imperial College London, from where he graduated in 1941. In 1942 Professor Friedrich Paneth was recruiting young chemists for the nuclear energy project. Wilkinson joined and was sent out to Canada, where he stayed in Montreal and later Chalk River Laboratories until he could leave in 1946. For the next four years he worked with Professor Glenn T. Seaborg at University of California, Berkeley, mostly on nuclear taxonomy.[3] He then became a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began to return to his first interest as a student - transition metal complexes of ligands such as carbon monoxide and olefins.

He was then at the Harvard University from September 1951 until he returned to England in December 1955, with a sabbatical break of nine months in Copenhagen. At Harvard, he still did some nuclear work on excitation functions for protons in cobalt, but had already begun to work on olefin complexes.

In June 1955 he was appointed to the chair of Inorganic Chemistry at Imperial College London, and from then on worked almost entirely on the complexes of transition metals.

In 1980 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Bath. Imperial College London named a new hall of residence after him, which opened in October 2009.

He was married, with two daughters.

Work

Structure of ferrocene Fe(C5H5)2

He is well known for his development of Wilkinson's catalyst RhCl(PPh3)3, and for the discovery of the structure of ferrocene. Wilkinson's catalyst is used industrially in the hydrogenation of alkenes to alkanes.[4]

He received many awards, including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 for his work on “organometallic compounds” (with Ernst Otto Fischer). He is also well known for writing, with his former doctoral student F. Albert Cotton, "Advanced Inorganic Chemistry", often referred to simply as "Cotton and Wilkinson", one of the standard inorganic chemistry textbooks.[5]

References

  1. ^ a b Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1098/rsbm.1999.0103, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1098/rsbm.1999.0103 instead.
  2. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi: 10.1021/ic961299i, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi= 10.1021/ic961299i instead.
  3. ^ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/643851/Sir-Geoffrey-Wilkinson
  4. ^ Osborn, J. A.; Jardine, F. H.; Young, J. F.; Wilkinson, G. (1966). "The Preparation and Properties of Tris(triphenylphosphine)halogenorhodium(I) and Some Reactions Thereof Including Catalytic Homogeneous Hydrogenation of Olefins and Acetylenes and Their Derivatives". Journal of the Chemical Society A: 1711–1732. doi:10.1039/J19660001711.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. ^ Cotton, Frank Albert (1999). Advanced Inorganic Chemistry. p. 1355. ISBN 0-471-19957-5, 9780471199571. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

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