Norman Greenwood

Norman Neill Greenwood (born January 19, 1925 in Melbourne , † November 14, 2012 in Leeds ) was an Australian chemist ( inorganic chemistry ).

Greenwood graduated from the University of Melbourne with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1945 and a master's degree in 1948. He was an outstanding student although he was only able to study part-time for financial reasons. He then went with an Exhibition of 1851 scholarship to the University of Cambridge (Sidney Sussex College), where he received his doctorate in 1951 under Harry Julius Emeléus . He then conducted research at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, where he dealt with atomic weights, isotopes and artificial elements. In 1953 he became a lecturer in inorganic chemistry at the University of Nottingham, where he set up his own research group. In 1961 he became a professor of inorganic chemistry at King's College in Durham, later the University of Newcastle upon Tyne . This was the UK's first inorganic chemistry chair. In 1971 he became a professor at the University of Leeds , where he headed the Department of Inorganic and Structural Chemistry and where he retired in 1990. From 1971 he was in the Senate of the University of Leeds.

He dealt with borohydrides and other compounds of main group elements and was one of the pioneers in the application of Mössbauer spectroscopy in chemistry. Greenwood was considered an expert in the chemistry of boron, initially with boron hydrides (and compounds of other elements of the boron group such as gallium, aluminum), later he also dealt with metal boranes . He discovered novel cluster compounds of boron hydrides with a variety of metals. He is known for a textbook with Alan Earnshaw Chemistry of the Elements and he was considered an outstanding teacher. The textbook also contributed to the spread and recognition of inorganic chemistry in the UK and has been translated into several languages. In the 1997 edition it has around 1300 pages. The book avoids the term inorganic chemistry in favor of chemistry of the elements, since Greenwood, as he explains in the preface, considers the subdivision to be out of date. In his own words, he also wanted to bring the basic facts and peculiarities of the respective elements and their connections, before an explanation by the most modern theory, as this would be subject to more frequent changes in Greenwood's experience. For the collection of facts, he looked for the addresses of 484 chemical companies from Chemical and Engineering News and asked them in detail about the individual elements, which led to the presentation (often in the form of overview boxes) of the use and industrial production of the elements in the book. An introductory chapter deals with the nuclear and astrophysical fundamentals of the formation and abundance of the elements in the universe (and their stable and unstable isotopes), a point which, according to Greenwood, has been neglected in other textbooks. The book also contains overviews of important historical data on each element. After he had also spent half a sabbatical year on the book, but at the same time had many other obligations and the time was running out, he called in his colleague Alan Earnshaw in Leeds to complete the book.

He was one of NASA's leading scientists for the analysis of the lunar rocks, mainly because of his expertise in Mössbauer spectroscopy. On one occasion, he was also invited by NASA to launch an Apollo moon rocket.

From 1970 to 1975 he was Chairman of the IUPAC Commission on Atomic Weights and was President of its Inorganic Chemistry Department.

In 1987 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry . He received honorary doctorates from universities in Japan and France and was a foreign member of the Académie des Sciences .

He was married to the Norwegian Kirsten Greenwood since 1951 and had three daughters. Greenwood loved to travel and has held extended visiting professorships on four continents.

His first PhD student was Kenneth Wade .

Fonts (selection)

• Principles of Atomic Orbitals - Monograph for Teachers, Royal Society of Chemistry, 1968
• Ionic crystals, lattice defects and nonstoichiometry, Butterworths, 1968
• with TC Gibb: Mössbauer Spectroscopy, Chapman and Hall, 1971
• as editor: Spectroscopic Properties of Inorganic and Organometallic Compounds, Royal Society of Chemistry, 9 volumes 1968 to 1976
• with Alan Earnshaw: Chemistry of the Elements, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1984, 2nd edition 1997, ISBN 978-0-08-037941-8 .
  • German translation: Chemistry of the elements, Weinheim: VCH 1988, 1990
• Recollections of a Scientist, 2 volumes, Xlibris 2012

Web links

• Obituary at the University of Leeds
• Obituary by Peter Perkins in the Guardian , Nov. 27, 2012
• Norman Greenwood, Web of Stories (interview)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Interview in Web of Stories