Harold Kroto
| Sir Harry Kroto | |||
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| Born | Harold Walter Krotoschiner 7 October 1939 Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom |
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| Died | 30 April 2016 (aged 76) Lewes, East Sussex, United Kingdom |
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| Nationality | British | ||
| Fields | Chemistry | ||
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| Alma mater | University of Sheffield | ||
| Thesis | The spectra of unstable molecules under high resolution (1964) | ||
| Known for | Buckminsterfullerene | ||
| Influences | Harry Heaney | ||
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| Children | David and Stephen | ||
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Website www |
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Sir Harold Walter Kroto, FRS (born Harold Walter Krotoschiner; 7 October 1939 – 30 April 2016), known as Harry Kroto, was an English chemist. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes. He is the recipient of many other honors and awards.
Kroto held many positions in academia throughout his life, most notably the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at the Florida State University, which he joined in 2004. Prior to this, he spent a large part of his career at the University of Sussex, where he held an emeritus professorship.
Kroto promoted science education and was a critic of religious faith.
Kroto was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, to Edith and Heinz Krotoschiner, with his name being of Silesian origin. His father's family came from Bojanowo, Poland, and his mother's from Berlin, Germany. Both his parents were born in Berlin and came to Great Britain in the 1930s as refugees from the Nazis because his father was Jewish. He was raised in Bolton, Lancashire, England, while the British authorities interned his father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien during World War II and attended Bolton School, where he was a contemporary of the actor Ian McKellen. In 1955, Harold's father shortened the family name to Kroto.
As a child, he became fascinated by a Meccano set. Kroto credited Meccano, as well as his aiding his father in the latter's balloon factory after World War II — amongst other things — with developing skills useful in scientific research. He developed an interest in chemistry, physics, and mathematics in secondary school, and because his sixth form chemistry teacher (Harry Heaney – who subsequently became a University Professor) felt that the University of Sheffield had the best chemistry department in the United Kingdom, he went to Sheffield.
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