Geoffrey Wilkinson

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Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson
Wilkinson, c. 1976
Born(1921-07-14)14 July 1921
Todmorden, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Died26 September 1996(1996-09-26) (aged 75)
London, England
NationalityBritish
Alma materImperial College London (PhD)
Known forHomogeneous transition metal catalysis
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsInorganic chemistry
Institutions
ThesisSome physico-chemical observations on hydrolysis in the homogeneous vapour phase (1946)
Doctoral advisorHenry Vincent Aird Briscoe[2]
Other academic advisorsGlenn T. Seaborg (post doctoral advisor)
Doctoral students
Other notable studentsRichard A. Andersen (postdoc)

Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson

Nobel laureate English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis.[6][7]

Education and early life

Wilkinson was born at Springside, Todmorden, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, Henry Wilkinson, was a master house painter and decorator; his mother, Ruth, worked in a local cotton mill. One of his uncles, an organist and choirmaster, had married into a family that owned a small chemical company making Epsom and Glauber's salts for the pharmaceutical industry; this is where he first developed an interest in chemistry.

He was educated at the local council primary school and, after winning a County Scholarship in 1932, went to

Todmorden Grammar School. His physics teacher there, Luke Sutcliffe, had also taught Sir John Cockcroft, who received a Nobel Prize for "splitting the atom". In 1939 he obtained a Royal Scholarship for study at Imperial College London, from where he graduated in 1941, with his PhD awarded in 1946 entitled "Some physico-chemical observations of hydrolysis in the homogeneous vapour phase".[8][2][9]

Wilkinson's catalyst
RhCl(PPh3)3

Career and research

In 1942 Professor

olefins
.

He was at Harvard University from September 1951 until he returned to England in December 1955, with a sabbatical break of nine months in Copenhagen. At Harvard, he still did some nuclear work on excitation functions for protons in cobalt, but had already begun to work on olefin complexes.

In June 1955 he was appointed to the chair of Inorganic Chemistry at Imperial College London, and from then on worked almost entirely on the complexes of transition metals.

Structure of ferrocene Fe(C5H5)2

Wilkinson is well known for his popularisation of the use of

alkanes.[11][12]

He supervised PhD students and postdoctoral researchers including John A. Osborn, Alan Davison[3][4] and Malcolm Green.[5]

Awards and honours

Wilkinson received many awards, including the

organometallic compounds" (with Ernst Otto Fischer). He is also well known for writing, with his former doctoral student F. Albert Cotton, "Advanced Inorganic Chemistry", often referred to simply as "Cotton and Wilkinson", one of the standard inorganic chemistry textbooks.[13]

He was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1965.[1] In 1980 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Bath. Imperial College London named a new hall of residence after him, which opened in October 2009. Wilkinson Hall is named in his honour.[14]

Personal life

Wilkinson was married to Lise Schou, a Danish plant physiologist whom he had met at Berkeley. They had two daughters, Anne and Pernille.[1]

References

  1. ^
    doi:10.1098/rsbm.1999.0103
    .
  2. ^ a b c "Geoffrey Wilkinson – Autobiography". nobelprize.org. 11 October 2012. Archived from the original on 11 October 2012. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
  3. ^
    hdl:10044/1/13205
    .
  4. ^
    ISSN 0080-4606
    .
  5. ^ a b Green, Malcolm Leslie Hodder Green (1958). A study of some transitional metal hydrides and olefin complexes. london.ac.uk (PhD thesis). Imperial College London.
  6. doi:10.1021/ic961299i
    .
  7. ^ "Geoffrey Wilkinson Patents". Archived from the original on 7 November 2017. Retrieved 31 October 2006.
  8. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.587112
  9. ^ Mainz, Vera V.; Girolami, Gregory S. (1988). "GENEALOGY DATABASE ENTRY – Wikinson, Geoffrey" (PDF). scs.illinois.edu.
  10. ^ "Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson | British chemist". 10 July 2023.
  11. ISSN 0869-7876
    .
  12. doi:10.1039/J19660001711
    .
  13. ISBN 9780471199571
    .
  14. ^ Wilkinson Hall at Imperial College London

External links

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