F. A. Cotton
| Frank Albert Cotton | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 9, 1930 Philadelphia, PA |
| Died | February 20, 2007 (aged 76) College Station, TX |
| Institutions | Texas A&M University |
| Doctoral advisor | Geoffrey Wilkinson |
| Notable awards |
National Medal of Science (1982) NAS Award in Chemical Sciences (1990) Priestley Medal (1998) Wolf Prize (2000) FRS |
Frank Albert Cotton (April 9, 1930 – February 20, 2007) was an American chemist. He was the W.T. Doherty-Welch Foundation Chair and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. He authored over 1600 scientific articles. Cotton was recognized for his research on the chemistry of the transition metals.
Frank Albert Cotton (known as "Al" Cotton, or "F Albert" on publications) was born on April 9, 1930 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended local public schools before Drexel University and then Temple University. After earning his BA degree from Temple in 1951, Cotton pursued a Ph.D. thesis under the guidance of Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson at Harvard University where he worked on metallocenes. He received his Ph.D in 1955.
Following his graduation from Harvard, Cotton began teaching at MIT. In 1961, at thirty-one years of age, he became the youngest person to have received a full professorship at MIT. His work emphasized both electronic structure and chemical synthesis. He pioneered the study of multiple bonding between transition metal atoms, starting with research on rhenium halides, and in 1964 identified the quadruple bond in the Re
2Cl2−
8 ion. His work soon focused on other metal-metal bonded species, elucidating the structure of chromium(II) acetate.
He was an early proponent of single crystal X-ray diffraction as a tool for elucidating the extensive chemistry of metal complexes. Through his studies on clusters, he demonstrated that many exhibited "fluxionality", whereby ligands interchange coordination sites on spectroscopically observable time-scales. He coined the term "hapticity" and the nomenclature that derives from it.
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