Paul von Ragué Schleyer

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Paul von Ragué Schleyer (born February 27, 1930 in Cleveland , Ohio , † November 21, 2014 in Ila , Georgia ) was an American chemist and professor of organic physical chemistry.

life and work

He graduated top of his class from Cleveland West Technical High School in 1947. In 1951, Schleyer received his Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University with magna cum laude . He received his doctorate in 1957 from Harvard University , where he worked in the group of Paul Doughty Bartlett (1907-1997). In 1962 he became a Sloan Research Fellow . In 1969 he became "Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry" at Princeton University . In 1975 he accepted a position at the University of Erlangen , where he became co-director of the Institute for Organic Chemistry and in 1993 founded the Computer Chemistry Center. In 1998 he retired in Erlangen, since then he has continued his work in Athens at the University of Georgia , where he was "Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry".

In a 1997 survey, Schleyer, who has now published well over 1,260 scientific articles, was the third most cited chemist in the world. Since 1984 he has been a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

He has published twelve books in the field of lithium chemistry, quantum chemical ab initio - molecular orbital theory and carbonium ions . He was the past president of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and editor of the Encyclopedia of Computational Chemistry .

Publications

Some of his twelve monographs were edited in collaboration with Nobel Prize winners such as John Anthony Pople , Herbert Charles Brown and George Andrew Olah . His research activities were also in the area of ​​the synthesis of adamantane and other cage compounds . He also discovered new types of hydrogen bonding and identified mechanisms of solvolysis and its reactive intermediates.

As a pioneer in the field of computational chemistry, he identified a number of new molecular structures, particularly those of lithium chemistry and electron-deficient compounds. Most recently he researched, among other things, the aromaticity and the hypercoordination of carbon (e.g. planar six-coordinate carbon ).

In 2013 he was co-author of a study that finally proved the characterization of the 2-norbornyl cation as a non-classical ion by X-ray structure analysis (a decade-long dispute between George A. Olah and Saul Winstein on the one hand (non-classical ion) and HC Brown on the other).

Honors

Schleyer received numerous honors and awards, including a. Honorary doctorates from the University of Lyon , the University of Munich , the University of Kiev and, in 2011, the University of Marburg , the Adolf von Baeyer medal , the James Flack Norris Award in physical chemistry, the Heisenberg Medal and the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007 . In 1999 he received the first Arfvedson-Schlenk Prize for lithium chemistry.

literature

  • Paul von Ragué Schleyer: From the Ivy League into the Honey Pot. American Chemical Society, Washington DC 1994, ISBN 0-8412-1844-7 . (Autobiography by Schleyer)
  • Henry F. Schaefer: Paul von Ragué Schleyer (1930-2014). In: Nature . Volume 517, 2015, p. 22, doi: 10.1038 / 517022a

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul von Ragué Schleyer Dies At 84
  2. ↑ The Computer Chemistry Center still exists at the University of Erlangen (as of the end of 2014), see homepage at http://www.chemie.uni-erlangen.de/ccc/
  3. ↑ 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
personal data
SURNAME Schleyer, Paul von Ragué
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH February 27, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Cleveland , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH November 21, 2014
Place of death Ila (Georgia)