George A. Olah

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George A. Olah, October 2009

George Andrew Olah , actually György Oláh (born May 22, 1927 in Budapest , † March 8, 2017 in Beverly Hills ) was an American chemist of Hungarian origin. In 1994 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry .

Life

Olah grew up in Hungary and studied at the Technical and Economic University of Budapest with Géza Zemplén . In just four years he completed his studies including a doctorate and in 1949 became a lecturer at Zemplén. Here Olah dealt with organic fluorides, for which Zemplén also provided him with the institute's balcony. Due to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, he and his family emigrated to Canada after a short stay in London ( Great Britain ) . From 1957 he worked there at Dow Chemical in Sarnia , Ontario . Olah's pioneering work on carbocation chemistry began during those eight years at Dow. In 1965 he went to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland , Ohio , before moving to the University of Southern California in 1977 . In 1971 he was naturalized in the USA.

He was Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and Director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute . In recent years he has prominently promoted the introduction of a methanol economy in which methanol, as a clean and efficient energy source, should replace oil and gas at low cost. In particular, methanol should also be synthesized with the help of renewable energy sources .

Olah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994 for his work in the field of carbocations . In 2005 he received the Priestley Medal , the American Chemical Society's highest honor . He was also accepted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1976 , the American Philosophical Society in 2001 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. In 1989 he was named California Scientist of the Year. In 1993 he received the Chemical Pioneer Award and in 1997 he became an external member of the Royal Society .

The George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon or Petroleum Chemistry is named after him, previously the ACS Award in Petroleum Chemistry, which Olah himself received in 1964.

Work areas

Olah was especially known for the study of carbocations and associated onium compounds in organic chemistry, which occur as reactive intermediates and can be represented after stabilization with super acids . He presented this in detail in his Nobel lecture in 1994 ( My search for carbokations and their role in chemistry ). The special properties of the magic acid were discovered in his laboratory (it breaks down hydrocarbon chains into tert- butyl cations, as in paraffin ). He also dealt with reaction mechanisms, substitution reactions , Friedel-Crafts reactions, and organic-metal and fluorine compounds. From the 1960s onwards, Olah was involved in the decades-long debate between Saul Winstein and Herbert C. Brown about the non-classical character of the carbocations of the 2-norbornyl cation (a norbornane derivative), whereby Olah and his group made it through NMR studies up to the 1980s succeeded in convincing most chemists of the non-classical character (carbocation) (the final proof was made in 2013 by X-ray crystallography). Most recently, he dealt with a future methanol economy in view of the exhaustion of fossil energy reserves. The extraction from biomass and wood as well as fossil fuels such as coal (when treated with super acids) and from carbon dioxide were considered. Carbon Recycling International named their plant for methanol production built in Iceland after GA Olah.

Non-classical (A) and classical (B) view of the 2-norbornyl cation

Works (selection)

  • GA Olah, P. v. R. Schleyer (Ed.): Carbonium Ions , 5 volumes, Wiley 1968 to 1972
  • GA Olah: Carbocations and electrophilic reactions , Wiley 1974
  • GA Olah: Halonium Ions , Wiley 1975
  • GA Olah, L. Malhotra, S. Narang: Nitration , VCH, Weinheim 1989
  • GA Olah, DR Squires: Chemistry of energetic materials , Academic Press 1991
  • GA Olah, KK Laali, Q. Wang, GKS Prakash: Onium Ions , Wiley, 1998.
  • GA Olah: A Life of Magic Chemistry , John Wiley & Sons, 2001.
  • GA Olah, A. Molnar: Hydrocarbon Chemistry , 2nd ed., Wiley, 2003.
  • GA Olah, GK Surya Prakash (Eds.): Carbocation Chemistry , Wiley, 2004.
  • GA Olah, A. Goeppert, Surya Prakash: Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy , Wiley-VCH, Weinheim 2005, ISBN 978-3-527-31275-7 , ISBN 3-527-31275-7
  • GA Olah, GK Surya Prakash, Jean Sommer, Arpad Molnar: Superacid Chemistry , 2nd edition, Wiley 2009 (first 1985 as Superacids )
  • GA Olah, GK Surya Prakash, Arpad Molnar, Kenneth Wade, Robert E. Williams: Hypercarbon Chemistry , 2nd edition, Wiley 2011
  • GA Olah: Crossing Conventional Boundaries in Half a Century of Research , Journal of Organic Chemistry, Volume 70, 2005, pp. 2413-2429
  • GA Olah, Douglas A. Klumpp: Superelectrophiles and their chemistry , Wiley 2007

literature

Web links

Commons : George A. Olah  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ George Oláh, Nobel Prize Winning Hungarian-American Chemist, Dies at 89. In: Hungary Today . Magyarország Barátai Alapítvány, March 9, 2017, accessed March 9, 2017 .
  2. Nachrichten aus der Chemie , 65, May 2017, p. 582, GDCh
  3. In his memoirs (J. Org. Chem., 17, 2005) he describes the position as Assistant Professor. As a student of Zemplén (although with a different research direction) Olah sees himself as the scientific grandson of Emil Fischer , the teacher of Zemplén.
  4. ^ Methanol instead of hydrogen , Interview in the Technology Review , March 10, 2006.
  5. ^ Member History: George A. Olah. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 1, 2018 (with biographical notes).
  6. ^ Olah, Nobel Lecture
  7. ^ Mark Peplow, Chemistry World, July 20, 2013
  8. F. Scholz, D. Himmel, FW Heinemann, P. v. R. Schleyer, K. Meyer, I. Krossing: Crystal Structure Determination of the Nonclassical 2-Norbornyl Cation, Science, Volume 341, 2013, pp. 62-64, abstract