George W. Wheland

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

George Willard Wheland (born April 21, 1907 in Chattanooga , Tennessee , † 1962 ) was an American chemist. He taught at the University of Chicago .

Life

Wheland received his doctorate in chemistry in 1932 under James B. Conant at Harvard University (master's degree in 1929) and was a post-doctoral student from 1932 to 1937 at Caltech with Linus Pauling . In 1936 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of London with Christopher Kelk Ingold . During this one-year stay he also worked with Cyril Hinshelwood in Oxford, visited John Lennard-Jones in Cambridge, Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich and Erich Hückel in Stuttgart. On his return in 1937 he went to the University of Chicago as a professor.

He published on organic bases and acids and was known for a three-edition textbook on organic chemistry and early work on quantum chemistry ( resonance theory ), including three essays with Linus Pauling . Both extended the theory of resonance to organic molecules. Among other things, he was co-author of the fifth essay of Pauling The nature of the chemical bond , from which the famous book by Pauling emerged. He considered resonance theory to be the most significant advance in structural chemistry since Gilbert Newton Lewis introduced the valence concept with shared electrons and wrote a textbook on it in 1944. In the second edition in 1955, he gave the molecular orbital theory broader space, which he also considered to be equivalent to the resonance theory on a fundamental level. He considered the resonance theory to be clearer and closer to the structure theory, especially for organic chemists. At the time, he saw both as approximations to the full quantum mechanical theory.

Kurt Mislow described his textbook on organic chemistry as an essential impetus for his own study of symmetry and stereochemistry.

According to him, Wheland complexes and intermediates named.

Wheland died of multiple sclerosis .

There has been a Wheland Lecture at the University of Chicago since 1991.

Fonts

  • The theory of resonance and its application to organic chemistry, Chapman and Hall 1944, Hathi Trust (digitized version)
  • Advanced Organic Chemistry, Wiley, 2nd edition 1949, 3rd edition 1960, Archives
  • Resonance in Organic Chemistry, Wiley 1955

literature

  • E. Thomas Strom: George W. Wheland: Forgotten Pioneer of Resonance Theory, in: Pionieer in Quantum Chemistry, Chapter 3, ACS Symposium Series 1122, American Chemical Society 2013, pp. 75-115

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Harvard Alumni Directory 1965
  2. ↑ Gavroglu, Simoes, Neither physics nor chemistry: a history of quantum chemistry, MIT Press 2012, p. 122
  3. ↑ Interview, Chemical Intelligencer 1998, No. 3
  4. ^ First as Syllabus of Advanced Organic Chemistry, University of Chicago 1948
personal data
SURNAME Wheland, George W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wheland, George Willard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Chattanooga , Tennessee
DATE OF DEATH 1962