| Reference number | EC/1989/42 |
| Previous numbers | Cert XXII, 186 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Fukui, Kenichi: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Date | 1988 |
| Description | Certificate of Candidate for Election to Foreign Membership. Citation typed |
| Citation | Co-recipient (with Roald Hoffmann) of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Foreign Associate, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 1985. Professor Fukui is renowned for the successful explanation and prediction of the course of various (especially organic) chemical reactions in a unified fashion using quantum mechanics. In his seminal studies of the stereoselectivity of organic compounds, he recognized the crucial role of electron delocalisation within the reactants and was the first to emphasize the importance of the so-called frontier orbitals which encompass the LUMO (lowest unoccupied) and HOMO (highest unoccupied) states, now an integral part of theoretical and other branches of chemistry. The detailed course of cyclic additions and intramolecular arrangements, for example, is interpretable in terms of the symmetry of frontier orbitals. The concepts which he has introduced have, both in his own hands and this of investigators throughout the world, proved enormously productive and clarifying. In recent years he has pioneered new wave-mechanical techniques for evaluating absolute rates of chemical reactions on potential energy surfaces, and new non-empirical methods of visualizing chemical reactions by so-called orbital picture graphics. |
| Access status | Closed |
Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | Name | Dates |
| NA5095 | Fukui; Kenichi (1918 - 1998) | 1918 - 1998 |