Ernst Otto FischerBorn 10 Nov 1918.German theoretical chemist and educator who was co-recipient (with British scientist Geoffrey Wilkinson) of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 for his identification of a completely new way in which metals and organic substances can combine. Fischer first knew of the newly synthesized organometallic sandwich compound called ferrocene from reading about it in 1951. Since at that time its structure was unknown, Fischer studied it, and determined that it consisted of a single iron atom sandwiched between two five-sided carbon rings. Wilkinson made this same discovery of independently of Fischer. |