Harold Kroto · Science & Medicine
Nobel laureate in chemistry (1996) for the discovery of fullerenes (buckyballs)
1939, Wisbech, England — 2016, Lewes, England
United Kingdom · United States
Harold Kroto is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Nobel laureate in chemistry (1996) for the discovery of fullerenes (buckyballs)
Origins and early life
Harold Walter Kroto was born Harold Walter Krotoschiner in Wisbech, in the Isle of Ely, on 7 October 1939, to Edith and Heinz Krotoschiner; both parents were born in Berlin and fled to Britain in the 1930s as refugees from Nazi Germany, and his father was Jewish. He was raised in Bolton while the British authorities interned his father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, and in 1955 his father shortened the family name to Kroto.
A Meccano set and helping in his father's balloon factory after the war gave him, he said, the hands that research needs; he read chemistry at Sheffield, taking a first in 1961 and a doctorate in molecular spectroscopy in 1964, and settled at Sussex, where he spent forty years.
Work and career
His interest was in long chains of carbon, which he had detected in interstellar space, and in 1985 he went to Rice University in Texas to reproduce with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley the conditions in a carbon star. What came out of the apparatus was not a chain. It was a closed cage of sixty carbon atoms, arranged in pentagons and hexagons like a football, stable and entirely unexpected — a third form of pure carbon after graphite and diamond.
They named it buckminsterfullerene, and the field of carbon nanoscience, including nanotubes, followed from it. Kroto shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Curl and Smalley, gave the rest of his life to science education, and died on 30 April 2016.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jewish Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry
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Nobel laureate in chemistry (1996) for the discovery of fullerenes (buckyballs)
Source: Jinfo.org — Jewish Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry
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