Harold Kroto

British chemist (1939–2016), co-discoverer of the fullerenes and joint winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Sir Harold Walter Kroto was a British chemist whose spectroscopic interest in carbon chains in interstellar space led, in 1985, to a landmark experiment at Rice University with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. Vaporizing graphite, the team found evidence of a remarkably stable 60-atom carbon molecule, C60 — a closed cage of hexagons and pentagons in the shape of a truncated icosahedron (the pattern of a soccer ball). This opened the field of fullerene chemistry, and Kroto shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Curl and Smalley for the discovery.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: influenced-by-fuller. When the discoverers needed to explain the geometry of the C60 cage, they recognized its resemblance to the geodesic structures of R. Buckminster Fuller and named the molecule buckminsterfullerene in his honor. The whole class of closed-cage carbon molecules became known as fullerenes, and C60 is popularly called the "buckyball." Kroto often credited Fuller's domes for helping him and his colleagues reason about how sixty carbon atoms could close into a stable, spherical shell, making Fuller's design geometry a direct conceptual aid in identifying the molecule's structure.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure, whose geodesic domes gave the molecule its name

Sources

• Compiled from general knowledge and corpus mentions; no single work in this corpus anchors this figure.