Rudolph Marcus

Born to a Jewish family in Montreal, Marcus worked in the United States on the deceptively simple question of how electrons jump between molecules in solution. Between 1956 and 1965 he built a mathematical theory that predicts the rate of these electron-transfer reactions from the reorganization of surrounding molecules, including the counterintuitive 'inverted region' later confirmed by experiment. Marcus theory underpins understanding of processes from photosynthesis to corrosion and won him the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.