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Paul Sabatier
1854–1941 · France · Born in the 1800s
Nobel Chemistry 1912
French chemist at the University of Toulouse who opened the field of metal-catalysed hydrogenation of organic compounds.
Nobel Prize work
Sabatier showed that finely divided metals, especially nickel, catalyse the addition of hydrogen to unsaturated organic compounds. His method turned hydrogenation into a general tool of organic synthesis and industry, earning him half of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Fields
Related topics
Complex reaction mechanisms, catalysis
Building rate laws from elementary steps, steady-state and rate-determining-step approximations, chain reactions, and how catalysts open alternative pathways.
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.