George
Andrew Olah (born Oláh
György; May 22, 1927 – March 8, 2017) was a Hungarian and American
chemist. His research involved the generation and reactivity of carbocations via superacids. For this research, Olah was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in
1994 "for his contribution to carbocation chemistry." He was also awarded the Priestley Medal, the highest honor granted by the American Chemical
Society and F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in
Chemical Research of the American Chemical
Society in 1996. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians. Olah
was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 22, 1927, to a
Jewish couple, Magda (Krasznai) and Gyula Oláh, a lawyer.[8][9] After the high school of Budapesti Piarista
Gimnazium (Scolopi fathers), he studied under organic chemist Géza Zemplén at the
Technical University of Budapest, now the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where he
earned M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Chemical Engineering. From 1949 through 1954, he taught at the
school as a professor of organic chemistry. In the subsequent two years, from 1954–1956,
he worked at the Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences, where he was Associate Scientific Director and Head of
the Department of Organic Chemistry. 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, with another Hungarian chemist, Stephen J.
Kuhn. Olah's pioneering work on carbocations started during his eight years
with Dow. In 1965, he returned to academia at Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland, Ohio, chairing the Department of
Chemistry from 1965 to 1969, and from 1967 through 1977 he was the C. F.
Maybery Distinguished Professor of Research in Chemistry. In 1971, Olah
became a naturalized citizen of
the United States. He then moved to the University
of Southern California in 1977. At USC, Olah was a
distinguished professor and the director of the Loker
Hydrocarbon Research Institute. Starting in 1980, he served as the
Distinguished Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of Chemistry and
later became a distinguished professor in USC's School of Engineering. In 1994, Olah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for
his contribution to carbocation chemistry". In particular, Olah's search for stable
nonclassical carbocations led to
the discovery of protonated methane stabilized by superacids, like FSO3H-SbF5 ("Magic Acid").
CH4 + H+ →
CH5+
Because these cations
were able to be stabilized, scientists could now use infrared spectroscopy and nuclear
magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to study them in
greater depth, as well as use them as catalysts in organic synthesis
reactions. Olah,
with Canadian chemist Saul Winstein, was also involved in a career-long battle
with Herbert C. Brown of Purdue over the existence of so-called "nonclassical"
carbocations – such as the norbornyl cation, which can be depicted as cationic
character delocalized over several bonds. Olah's studies of the cation
with NMR spectroscopy provided more evidence suggesting that Winstein's model
of the non-classical cation, "featuring a pair of [delocalized]
electrons smeared between three carbon atoms," was correct. In 1997, the
Olah family formed an endowment fund (the
George A. Olah Endowment) which grants annual awards to outstanding chemists,
including the George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon or Petroleum Chemistry,
formerly known as the ACS Award in Petroleum Chemistry. The awards are
selected and administered by the American Chemical
Society. Later in his career, his research shifted
from hydrocarbons and
their transformation into fuel to the methanol economy, namely generating methanol from methane.[19] He joined with Robert Zubrin, Anne Korin, and James Woolsey in promoting a flexible-fuel mandate
initiative. In 2005, Olah wrote an essay promoting the methanol economy
in which he suggested that methanol could be produced from hydrogen gas (H2) and industrially derived
or atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2),
using energy from renewable sources to power the production process.
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