Gilbert N. Lewis

Gilbert Newton Lewis was born in 1875 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, earned his PhD from Harvard, and arrived at Berkeley in 1912 to teach chemistry. He rebuilt chemical thermodynamics into something mathematically rigorous that working chemists could use, then in 1916 proposed the theory of bonding and electron pairs that now bears his name. He measured free energies, purified heavy water as part of isotope separation work starting in 1933, redefined acids and bases, and in 1926 coined "photon" while working on relativity and quantum problems. His students collected Nobels - Urey, Giauque, Seaborg, Libby, Calvin - and Berkeley became a chemistry powerhouse, but Lewis himself never won despite 41 nominations. On March 23, 1946, he was found dead in his lab where he'd been working with hydrogen cyanide; many believed it was suicide.