Kroto, Sir Harold Walter

Kroto, Sir Harold Walter,

1939–, British chemist, Ph.D. Univ. of Sheffield, 1964. Kroto was a member of the faculty at Univ. of Sussex from 1967 to 2004 and is still an emeritus professor there. He has been a professor at Florida State Univ. since 2004. Kroto 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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, 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.