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George Andrew Olah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| George Andrew Olah | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 22, 1927 Budapest, Hungary |
| Institutions | University of Southern California |
| Alma mater | Budapest University of Technology and Economics |
| Notable prizes |  Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1994 |
George Andrew Olah (born May 22, 1927 in Budapest, as Oláh György) is a Hungarian-born American chemist. He was significant in stabilizing and in studying carbocations via superacids. He won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994. Soon after, he was awarded the Priestley Medal, the highest honor granted by the American Chemical Society.
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Olah studied, then taught, at what is now Budapest University of Technology and Economics. As a result of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he and his family moved briefly to England and then to Canada where he joined Dow Chemical in Sarnia, Ontario. Olah's pioneering work on carbocations started during his eight years with Dow. In 1965 he returned to academia at Case Western Reserve University and then to University of Southern California in 1977. In 1971, Olah became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Olah is currently a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California and the director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. In 2005, Olah wrote an essay promoting the methanol economy.
The search for stable carbocations lead to the discovery of protonated methane which was stabilized by superacids, like FSO3H-SbF5 ("Magic Acid").
- CH4 + H+ → CH5+
From the research on hydrocarbons and there transformation into fuel his research shifted in recent years the Methanol economy.
- George A. Olah, Alain Goeppert, G.K. Surya Prakash, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, Angewandte Chemie International Edition Volume 44, Issue 18, Pages 2636 - 2639, 2005
- Nobel Prize website
- Methanol as an alternative fuel Recording of a discussion with George Olah broadcast on NPR.
- My Search for Carbocations and Their Role in Chemistry Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1994 by George A. Olah
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William Lipscomb (1976) • Ilya Prigogine (1977) • Peter D. Mitchell (1978) • Herbert C. Brown / Georg Wittig (1979) • Paul Berg / Walter Gilbert / Frederick Sanger (1980) • Kenichi Fukui / Roald Hoffmann (1981) • Aaron Klug (1982) • Henry Taube (1983) • Robert Merrifield (1984) • Herbert A. Hauptman / Jerome Karle (1985) • Dudley R. Herschbach / Yuan T. Lee / John Polanyi (1986) • Donald J. Cram / Jean-Marie Lehn / Charles J. Pedersen (1987) • Johann Deisenhofer / Robert Huber / Hartmut Michel (1988) • Sidney Altman / Thomas Cech (1989) • Elias Corey (1990) • Richard R. Ernst (1991) • Rudolph A. Marcus (1992) • Kary Mullis / Michael Smith (1993) • George Olah (1994) • Paul J. Crutzen / Mario J. Molina / Frank Rowland (1995) • Robert Curl / Harold Kroto / Richard Smalley (1996) • Paul D. Boyer / John E. Walker / Jens Christian Skou (1997) • Walter Kohn / John Pople (1998) • Ahmed Zewail (1999) • Alan J. Heeger / Alan MacDiarmid / Hideki Shirakawa (2000) |
Categories: 1927 births | Living people | People from Budapest | Hungarian chemists | Hungarian Jews | Naturalized citizens of the United States | Nobel laureates in Chemistry | Hungarian Nobel laureates | Jewish scientists | Members and associates of the United States National Academy of Sciences | Foreign Members of the Royal Society | Priestley Medal | University of Southern California faculty