George Andrew Olah

Born in Budapest in 1927, Olah came of age in a city that churned out physicists and chemists at an eerie rate — György Marx later called them "The Martians." The 1956 revolution sent him to the U.K., then Canada in 1964, and finally the United States a year later, carrying his carbocation work with him. His insight was procedural: superacids could stabilize the fleeting charged species long enough to study them, cracking open reaction mechanisms chemists had only guessed at. The Nobel came in 1994 for that contribution. Two years later he collected the Priestley Medal, the American Chemical S…