25 Facts About William Lipscomb

William Lipscomb's family moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1920, and he lived there until he received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at the University of Kentucky in 1941.

William Lipscomb went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1946.

William Lipscomb was married to the former Mary Adele Sargent from 1944 to 1983.

William Lipscomb resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 2011 from pneumonia.

In grade school William Lipscomb collected animals, insects, pets, rocks, and minerals.

William Lipscomb credits gaining many intuitive physics concepts from this book and from his conversations with Downing, who became William Lipscomb's lifelong friend.

The young William Lipscomb participated in other projects, such as Morse-coded messages over wires and crystal radio sets, with five nearby friends who became physicists, physicians, and an engineer.

Aged 12, William Lipscomb was given a small Gilbert chemistry set.

William Lipscomb expanded it by ordering apparatus and chemicals from suppliers and by using his father's privilege as a physician to purchase chemicals at the local drugstore at a discount.

William Lipscomb made his own fireworks and entertained visitors with color changes, odors, and explosions.

William Lipscomb's mother questioned his home chemistry hobby only once, when he attempted to isolate a large amount of urea from urine.

William Lipscomb credits perusing the large medical texts in his physician father's library and the influence of Linus Pauling years later to his undertaking biochemical studies in his later years.

William Lipscomb took care to include gas analyses and to search for probable side reactions.

William Lipscomb later had a high-school physics course and took first prize in the state contest on that subject.

At Caltech William Lipscomb intended to study theoretical quantum mechanics with Prof.

William Lipscomb worked in three main areas, nuclear magnetic resonance and the chemical shift, boron chemistry and the nature of the chemical bond, and large biochemical molecules.

William Lipscomb's group did not propose or discover the three-center two-electron bond, nor did they develop formulas that give the proposed mechanism.

William Lipscomb's group achieved an understanding of it through electron orbital calculations using formulas by Edmiston and Ruedenberg and by Boys.

The Eberhardt, Crawford, and William Lipscomb paper discussed above devised the "styx rule" method to catalog certain kinds of boron-hydride bonding configurations.

The diamond-square-diamond mechanism was suggested by William Lipscomb to explain this rearrangement of vertices.

The B10H16 structure determined by Grimes, Wang, Lewin, and William Lipscomb found a bond directly between two boron atoms without terminal hydrogens, a feature not previously seen in other boron hydrides.

William Lipscomb's group developed calculation methods, both empirical and from quantum mechanical theory.

William Lipscomb's group used x-ray diffraction to solve the three-dimensional structure of these proteins to atomic resolution, and then to analyze the atomic detail of how the molecules work.

William Lipscomb's group contributed to an understanding of concanavalin A, glucagon, and carbonic anhydrase.

William Lipscomb began by studying compounds of nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, and other substances that are solid only below liquid nitrogen temperatures, but other advantages eventually made low-temperatures a normal procedure.