12 Facts About Geoffrey Wilkinson

Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson FRS was a Nobel laureate English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis.

Geoffrey Wilkinson's father, Henry Wilkinson, was a master house painter and decorator; his mother, Ruth, worked in a local cotton mill.

Geoffrey Wilkinson was educated at the local council primary school and, after winning a County Scholarship in 1932, went to Todmorden Grammar School.

Geoffrey Wilkinson joined and was sent out to Canada, where he stayed in Montreal and later Chalk River Laboratories until he could leave in 1946.

Geoffrey Wilkinson was at Harvard University from September 1951 until he returned to England in December 1955, with a sabbatical break of nine months in Copenhagen.

Geoffrey Wilkinson is well known for his popularisation of the use of Geoffrey Wilkinson's catalyst RhCl3 in catalytic hydrogenation, and for the discovery of the structure of ferrocene.

Geoffrey Wilkinson's catalyst is used industrially in the hydrogenation of alkenes to alkanes.

Geoffrey Wilkinson supervised PhD students and postdoctoral researchers including John A Osborn, Alan Davison and Malcolm Green.

Geoffrey Wilkinson received many awards, including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 for his work on "organometallic compounds".

Geoffrey Wilkinson is well known for writing, with his former doctoral student F Albert Cotton, "Advanced Inorganic Chemistry", often referred to simply as "Cotton and Wilkinson", one of the standard inorganic chemistry textbooks.

Geoffrey Wilkinson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1965.

Geoffrey Wilkinson was married to Lise Schou, a Danish plant physiologist whom he had met at Berkeley.