Michael J. S. Dewar
| Michael J. S. Dewar | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Michael James Steuart Dewar September 24, 1918 Ahmednagar, Ahmednagar District, Bombay Presidency, British India (now in Maharashtra, India) |
| Died | October 10, 1997 (aged 79) Gainesville, Florida, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Institutions |
University of London 1951- University of Chicago 1959- University of Texas 1963- University of Florida 1989-1994 |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford |
| Known for | Dewar-Chatt-Duncanson model |
| Notable awards | Fellow of the Royal Society (1960); Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1966); Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1983); Honorary Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford (1974); Tilden Medal of the Chemical Society (1954); Harrison Howe Award of the American Chemical Society (1961); Robert Robinson Medal, Chemical Society (1974); G.W. Wheland Medal of the University of Chicago (1976); Evans Award, The Ohio State University (1977); Southwest Regional Award of the American Chemical Society (1978); Davy Medal, Royal Society of London (1982); James Flack Norris Award of the American Chemical Society (1984); William H. Nichols Award of the Americal Chemical Society (1986); Auburn-G. M. Kosolapoff Award of the American Chemical Society (1988); Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (1989); WATOC Medal (World Association of Theoretical Organic Chemists Meda), (1990). |
Michael James Steuart Dewar (24 September 1918 – 10 October 1997) was a theoretical chemist.
Dewar was the son of Scottish parents, Annie Balfour (Keith) and Francis Dewar. He received the degrees of Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and DPhil from the Balliol College, Oxford. He was appointed to the Chair in Chemistry at Queen Mary College of the University of London in 1951. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1959 and then to the first Robert A. Welch research chair at the University of Texas at Austin in 1963. After a long and productive period there, he moved to the University of Florida in 1989. He retired in 1994 as Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida. He died in 1997.
Dewar's reputation for providing original solutions to vexing puzzles first developed when he was still a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University. In 1945, he deduced the correct structure for stipitatic acid, a mold product whose structure had baffled the leading chemists of the day. It involved a new kind of aromatic structure with a seven-membered ring for which Dewar coined the term tropolone. The discovery of the tropolone structure launched the field of non-benzenoid aromaticity, which witnessed feverish activity for several decades and greatly expanded the chemists' understanding of cyclic π-electron systems. Also in 1945, Dewar devised the then novel notion of a π complex, which he proposed as an intermediate in the benzidine rearrangement. This offered the first correct rationalization of the electronic structure of complexes of transition metals with alkenes, later known as the Dewar-Chatt-Duncanson model.
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