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Geoffrey Wilkinson

1921–1996 · United Kingdom · 20th century

Nobel Chemistry 1973

British chemist who co-founded organometallic sandwich chemistry and created Wilkinson's catalyst for homogeneous hydrogenation.

Nobel Prize work

Independently of Ernst Otto Fischer, he determined the sandwich structure of ferrocene and developed the general chemistry of organometallic compounds in which a metal atom is bound between two rings. This work, together with his later discovery of the hydrogenation catalyst known as Wilkinson's catalyst, founded modern organometallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis.

Fields

Inorganic chemistryOrganic chemistry

Related topics

Metal–carbon compounds

Organometallic compounds place a metal in direct contact with carbon. Their bonds range from highly polar M–C σ bonds to multicentre metal–ligand interactions such as η² alkene, η⁵ cyclopentadienyl and metal carbonyl coordination.

Homogeneous catalysis (Ziegler–Natta, Grubbs)

A homogeneous catalyst moves through a closed sequence of elementary steps in the same phase as the substrate. Small changes in ligands, oxidation state or vacant sites can redirect an entire cycle and change selectivity.

Chemists in the same field

Robert Bruce Merrifield (1921)Donald J. Cram (1919)William N. Lipscomb (1919)Derek H. R. Barton (1918)Kenichi Fukui (1918)John Warcup Cornforth (1917)