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inorganic chemist who shared a Nobel prize 1973 for his pioneering work
on the organometallic compounds of the transition metals. Wilkinson was born near Manchester and studied at Imperial College, University of London. He held numerous posts in North America, and was assistant professor at Harvard 1951-56. He then moved back to Imperial College, where he was professor of inorganic chemistry, retiring 1988. Wilkinson's Nobel-prizewinning work was done with US chemist R B Woodward. An organometallic molecule consists of a metal atom sandwiched between carbon rings. The synthetic compound they were investigating, ferrocene, turned out to have a single iron atom sandwiched between two five-sided carbon rings; materials were later created with other metals and four-, six-, seven-, and eight-membered carbon rings. |