Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: Bitman & PawełMM — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

George A. Olah

1927–2017 · Hungary, United States · 20th century

Nobel Chemistry 1994

Hungarian-American chemist who made carbocations directly observable and later championed a methanol-based carbon cycle.

Nobel Prize work

Used superacids such as magic acid to stabilize carbocations at low temperature, making these fleeting intermediates observable by NMR and spectroscopy. His work overturned the classic view of carbocations, revealed nonclassical bridged structures, and reshaped mechanistic organic chemistry.

Fields

Related topics

Chemists in the same field