Paul Flory

Paul John Flory was born June 19, 1910, and trained as a chemist at a moment when polymers were still mysterious tangles in the lab. He pioneered the understanding of how macromolecules behave in solution — work that was both theoretical and experimental, mapping the physics of materials most people only knew as products. In 1974 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for those fundamental achievements in the physical chemistry of macromolecules. He died September 9, 1985, having spent a career translating the chaos of long-chain molecules into equations the field could use.