Paul J. Flory
| Paul Flory | |
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| Born | Paul John Flory June 19, 1910 Sterling, Illinois |
| Died | September 9, 1985 (aged 75) Big Sur, California |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physical chemistry of polymers |
| Institutions | DuPont, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University |
| Alma mater | Manchester University (Indiana) and Ohio State University |
| Doctoral advisor | Herrick L. Johnston |
| Known for | Polymers |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1974) National Medal of Science (1974) Priestley Medal (1974) Perkin Medal (1977) Elliott Cresson Medal (1971) Peter Debye Award (1969) Charles Goodyear Medal (1968) |
Paul John Flory (June 19, 1910 – September 9, 1985) was an American chemist and Nobel laureate who was known for his work in the field of polymers, or macromolecules. He was a leading pioneer in understanding the behavior of polymers in solution, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1974 "for his fundamental achievements, both theoretical and experimental, in the physical chemistry of macromolecules".
After graduating from Elgin High School in Elgin, Illinois in 1927, Flory received a bachelor's degree from Manchester College (Indiana) (now Manchester University) in 1931 and a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 1934. His first position was at DuPont with Wallace Carothers.
Flory's earliest work in polymer science was in the area of polymerization kinetics at the DuPont Experimental Station. In condensation polymerization, he challenged the assumption that the reactivity of the end group decreased as the macromolecule grew, and by arguing that the reactivity was independent of the size, he was able to derive the result that the number of chains present decreased with size exponentially. In addition polymerization, he introduced the important concept of chain transfer to improve the kinetic equations and remove difficulties in understanding the polymer size distribution.
In 1938, after Carothers' death, Flory moved to the Basic Science Research Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati. There he developed a mathematical theory for the polymerization of compounds with more than two functional groups and the theory of polymer networks or gels.
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