Wilkinson, Geoffrey (1921–1996)

English inorganic chemist who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 for his pioneering work on the organometallic compounds of the transition metals. He was knighted in 1976.

Wilkinson was born near Manchester and studied at Imperial College, University of London. He held numerous posts in North America, and was assistant professor at Harvard 1951–56. He then moved back to Imperial College, where he was professor of inorganic chemistry, retiring in 1988. He cowrote the textbook Advanced Inorganic Chemistry (1962).

Wilkinson's Nobel-prize-winning work was done with US chemist R B Woodward. An organometallic molecule consists of a metal atom sandwiched between carbon rings. The synthetic compound they were investigating, ferrocene, turned out to have a single iron atom sandwiched between two five-sided carbon rings; materials were later created with other metals and four-, six-, seven-, and eight-membered carbon rings.