Fukui Ken'ichi

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Memorial stone for Fukui Ken'ichi

Fukui Ken'ichi ( Japanese 福井 謙 一 , Fukui Ken'ichi ; born October 4, 1918 in Nara , Nara Prefecture , Japan ; † January 9, 1998 in Kyoto ) was a Japanese chemist . He is also known as the first Asian scientist to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Life

Fukui Ken'ichi was born on October 4, 1918 in Nara, the son of foreign trade merchant and company manager Ryokichi Fukui and his wife Chie Fukui. Chemistry was not one of his favorite subjects when he went to school and therefore he had no plans for a professional development in this direction. But following the advice of Professor Gen-itsu from the Imperial University of Kyoto, he decided to specialize in industrial chemistry. There he also completed his studies and received his doctorate as a chemical engineer at the University of Kyoto in 1941 . After graduating, he mainly worked in the Army Fuel Laboratory, doing experimental research on the synthetic production of fuels. From 1943 he worked as a lecturer at the Imperial University of Kyoto, from 1945 as an assistant professor and from 1951 as a full professor of theoretical chemistry. In 1944 he received a first prize for the research results he developed. In 1952 he succeeded in establishing a correlation between the boundary electron density and the chemical reactivity in aromatic hydrogens. That was a decisive discovery, which he was able to expand further in the years to come and to justify it more theoretically. At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, he began to describe the chemical reactions more intensely, because that helped to depict the geometric shapes of the reacting molecules. Many of his scientific publications up to 1972 a total of 137 dealt with topics of reaction engineering and catalytic engineering in chemical substances. In 1983 he retired. He was then President of the Kyoto Institute for Technology until 1988 and then Director of the Institute for Basic Chemistry.

He received together with Roald Hoffmann 1981 the chemistry - Nobel Prize . Fukui received it for the development of the theory of the frontier orbital (Frontier Molecular Orbital Theory, FMO), which Fukui set up in 1952 and then further developed. She provided a qualitative explanation of reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry (in Fukui especially of aromatics), which were based on the molecular orbital theory with the concept of HOMO and LUMO (both are also referred to as frontier orbitals). At first, the theory was heavily criticized. In the 1960s, however, there were similar studies by Roald Hoffmann and Robert Burns Woodward (who died in 1979 and was therefore not considered for the Nobel Prize), who explained the reaction mechanisms in pericyclic reactions by considering the symmetry of the molecular orbitals ( Woodward-Hoffmann rules ) and so on Generally convinced chemists of the usefulness of such considerations of molecular orbital theory in predicting chemical reactions in organic chemistry.

In 1981 he was admitted to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1983 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Japanese Academy of Sciences . In 1989 he was elected an external member of the Royal Society . In 1998 the asteroid (6924) Fukui was named after him. He was a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science . In 1981 Fukui was awarded the Order of Culture .

In 1947 Fukui Ken`ichi married his future wife Tomoe Horie. This marriage resulted in two children, a son Tetsuya and a daughter Miyako.

He died on January 9, 1998 in Kyoto.

Fukui medal

The Asia-Pacific Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists has been awarding a medal named after Fukui for outstanding theoretical chemists and scientists in computational chemistry in the Asia-Pacific region every year since 2005. Prize winners were:

  • 2005 Keiji Morokuma (Emory University, Atlanta) for his pioneering contributions to the development of theoretical and computational chemistry (Computational Chemistry).
  • 2006 Leo Radom (University of Sydney, Sydney) for his pioneering contributions to the application of theoretical and computational chemistry.
  • 2007 Kimihiko Hirao (University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan) for his outstanding contributions to the development of the theory of computational quantum chemistry.
  • 2008 Debashis Mukherjee (Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata) for his pioneering studies in the Coupled Cluster Formalism.
  • 2009 Hiroshi Nakatsuji (Quantum Chemistry Research Institute, Kyoto, Japan) for his pioneering work in the development and applications of modern theoretical chemistry.
  • 2010 Kwang S. Kim (Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, Korea) for extensive pioneering contributions to the application of theoretical and computational chemistry in the design of new materials.
  • 2011 Peter A. Schwerdtfeger (Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand) for his significant achievements in quantum chemistry, particularly his deeper understanding of relativistic quantum effects.
  • 2012 Shigeru Nagase (Institute for Molecular Science, Okazaki, Japan) for his outstanding achievements in theoretical and computational chemistry in close interaction with the experiment.
  • 2013 Peter Gill (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia) for his innovative contributions to the theory of electron correlation and uniform electron gases.
  • 2014 Yun-Dong Wu (Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, China) for his outstanding contributions to the application of theoretical and computational chemistry.
  • 2015 Shigeyoshi Sakaki (Kyoto University, Japan) for his outstanding contributions in theoretical and computational studies of complex systems with transition metal elements.
  • 2016 Eluvathingal Jemmis (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) for his unique theoretical approach which facilitated the understanding of the organometallic chemistry of transition metals, of analogies in main group elements and of boron and its compounds.
  • 2017 Wenjian Liu (Peking University, China) for outstanding contributions to relativistic quantum chemistry.
  • 2018 Richard Ming Wah Wong (National University of Singapore) for outstanding contributions in the application of computational chemistry to physical organic chemistry.

Fonts

  • Theory of Orientation and Stereoselection 1970
  • Kenichi Fukui: The Role of Frontier Orbitals in Chemical Reactions (Nobel Lecture) . In: Angewandte Chemie International Edition . tape 21 , no. 11 , 1982, pp. 801-809 , doi : 10.1002 / anie.198208013 .
  • Kenichi Fukui: Frontier Orbitals - Their Significance in Chemical Reactions (Nobel Lecture) . In: Angewandte Chemie . tape 94 , no. 11 , 1982, pp. 852-861 , doi : 10.1002 / anie.19820941105 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Kenichi Fukui, Teijiro Yonezawa, Haruo Shingu: A Molecular Orbital Theory of Reactivity in Aromatic Hydrocarbons , The Journal of Chemical Physics, Volume 20, 1952, p. 722
  2. Minor Planet Circ. 32347
  3. APATCC Awards