George Andrew Olah
✓ Source-basedstableHungarian chemist (1927-2017)
He made invisible molecules visible - carbocations, charged fragments of carbon too unstable to trap, until Olah froze them in superacids and watched them work. The Nobel in 1994 marked chemistry catching up to what he'd quietly proved decades earlier.
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Photos 6
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Awards 19
Connected to George 6
Klaus von KlitzingAlso won honorary doctorate from University of Montpellier-II
Carolyn BertozziAlso won F. A. Cotton Medal
Robert H. GrubbsAlso won George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon or Petroleum Chemistry
David H. HubelAlso won honorary doctor of the Ohio State UniversityDonald J. CramAlso won Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry
James Bryant ConantAlso won Priestley MedalAbout this person
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 Society's top honor, and the F.A. Cotton Medal. He died in California in March 2017.
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