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George Andrew Olah

George Andrew Olah
Born	May 22 1927(1927-05-22) 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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Life

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.

Work

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⁺

In recent years, his research has shifted from hydrocarbons and their transformation into fuel to the methanol economy.

References

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

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Nobel Laureates in Chemistry

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)

Complete roster | (1901–1925) | (1926–1950) | (1951–1975) | (1976-2000) | (2001–2025)

Categories: Hungarian chemists | Nobel laureates in Chemistry | Priestley Medal

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "George_Andrew_Olah". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.