Kroto, Harry
Kroto, Harry
(Sir Harold Walter Kroto), 1939–2016, British chemist, b. Harold Walter Krotoschiner, Ph.D. Univ. of Sheffield, 1964. Kroto was the son of German parents who fled Nazi rule to England. He was a member of the faculty at Univ. of Sussex from 1967 to 2004, when he became professor emeritus, and also was a professor at Florida State Univ. from 2004 until his death. He was corecipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert CurlCurl, Robert Floyd, Jr.,1933–, American chemist, b. Alice, Tex., Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1957. Curl has been a professor at Rice Univ. in Houston, Tex., since 1958.
..... Click the link for more information. and Richard SmalleySmalley, Richard Errett,
1943–2005, American chemist, b. Akron, Ohio, Ph.D. Princeton, 1973. He was a professor at Rice Univ. in Houston, Tex., from 1976 until his death in 2005.
..... Click the link for more information. for the discovery of fullerenesfullerene,
any of a class of carbon molecules in which the carbon atoms are arranged into 12 pentagonal faces and 2 or more hexagonal faces to form a hollow sphere, cylinder, or similar figure.
..... Click the link for more information. , which are carbon atoms bound in the form of a structure that looks like a soccer ball. The work opened up new avenues of research in chemistry, including efforts to exploit the unique properties of these materials in nanotechnology.