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Irving Langmuir

1881–1957 · United States · Born in the 1800s

Nobel Chemistry 1932

Pioneered surface chemistry, including adsorption and molecular monolayers, and refined the octet rule for chemical bonding.

Nobel-winning work

The 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized his discoveries in surface chemistry. He showed that gases adsorb on solids in monomolecular layers, quantified adsorption with the Langmuir isotherm θ=bP1+bP\theta = \frac{bP}{1+bP}, and analyzed reactions on filaments and liquid films — work that founded the modern science of surfaces and heterogeneous catalysis.

Fields

Physical chemistry

Related topics

Adsorption, heterogeneous catalysis

How molecules stick to surfaces and why that sticking makes catalysts work: physisorption versus chemisorption, the Langmuir and BET isotherms, and Langmuir–Hinshelwood kinetics.

Chemists in the same field

Peter Debye (1884)Theodor Svedberg (1884)Francis William Aston (1877)Gilbert N. Lewis (1875)Harold Urey (1893)Fritz Haber (1868)