Up for auction"Nobel Prize in Chemistry" George Olah Hand Signed 3X5 Card.This item is
certified authentic by Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their Certificate
of Authenticity. ES - 8253 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. 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.[16] 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. 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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