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Photo credit: Eddie Adams — File:William Nunn Lipscomb 1976.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain

William N. Lipscomb

1919–2011 · United States · 20th century

Nobel Chemistry 1976

American chemist who decoded the structures and bonding of the boranes, founding the chemistry of electron-deficient compounds.

Nobel Prize work

Using X-ray diffraction at very low temperatures, Lipscomb mapped the structures of boron hydrides (boranes) and explained their strange geometry with three-centre two-electron bonds. The work demolished the assumption that ordinary electron-pair bonds suffice everywhere and reshaped how chemists think about electron-deficient molecules.

Fields

Inorganic chemistryPhysical chemistry

Related topics

Ionic, covalent and metallic bonding

Compare ionic attraction, shared electron pairs and delocalised metallic electrons. Bonding models explain why solids conduct, melt or fracture differently.

Main-group and rare-earth element chemistry

Main-group and rare-earth organometallics occupy opposite bonding extremes: many main-group M–C bonds are polar, aggregated and air-sensitive, while lanthanide compounds are ionic, oxophilic and usually stable in the +3 oxidation state. Their structures and reactions differ strongly from late-transition-metal chemistry.

Chemists in the same field

Jens C. Skou (1918)Jerome Karle (1918)George Porter (1920)Peter D. Mitchell (1920)Ilya Prigogine (1917)Geoffrey Wilkinson (1921)