Geoffrey Wilkinson

Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson ( * July 14, 1921 in Spring Side, Yorkshire, United Kingdom, † September 26, 1996 in London) was a British chemist.

From 1955 he held the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at Imperial College London.

He proposed in 1951 for the ferrocene a "sandwich structure " before, it developed the concept of the sandwich compounds and received this in 1973 with Ernst Otto Fischer awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In sandwich compounds are compounds of metals with the aromatic, in which the metal atom is sandwiched by the annular aromatics.

Wilkinson also developed the Wilkinson catalyst.

From 1976 Geoffrey Wilkinson wore the English peerage Sir. In 1965 he became a member of the Royal Society, the Royal Medal in 1981 and 1996, the Davy Medal awarded him.