Hydrocarbon Chemistry

George Andrew Olah was born in Budapest, Hungary on May 22, 1927. After World War II, he received master's and doctoral degrees from the Technical University of Budapest. He and his family fled Hungary after the 1956 uprising, eventually settling in Canada. His worked at a Dow Chemical Company research laboratory and discovered superacids. In 1965, he left Dow to return to academia as a chemistry professor at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He moved to the University of Southern California in 1977 and founded the Hydrocarbon Research Institute there.

His advances in the understanding of hydrocarbons have been used in an array of applications including the development of gasoline that burns more cleanly and the discovery of new drugs. He wrote nearly 1,500 scientific papers and held 160 patents in seven countries. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994 for his study of the chemical reactions of carbon compounds. He also wrote an autobiography entitled A Life of Magic Chemistry. He died on March 8, 2017 at the age of 89.

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