Herbert Charles Brown
Brown, Herbert Charles (1912-) was a British-born American organic chemist who made important contributions to the study of boron compounds. For his work in creating compounds that produce chemical bonds, Brown shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Georg Wittig .
Brown's research yielded inexpensive methods to create rare compounds. He also developed a number of reducing agents that can be used in a variety of applications. While at Purdue, Brown discovered a process to produce organoboranes, compounds that have proven valuable as intermediates in the creation of carbon-carbon bonds. In addition, he investigated the steric effect, the effect of the arrangement of atoms within a molecule.
Herbert Charles Brovarnik was born in London. When Brown was 2 years old, his parents emigrated from London to Chicago and changed their name to Brown. When his father died of an infection in 1926, Brown left school to help his mother run the family hardware store. A few years later he returned to school and graduated in 1930. After receiving a partial scholarship, he attended the University of Chicago, earning a B.S. degree in 1936 and a Ph.D. degree in 1938. He achieved the rank of instructor at Chicago before leaving to join the faculty at Wayne (now Wayne State) University in Detroit. In 1947, he accepted a position as professor of chemistry at Purdue University, where he was appointed R. B. Wetherill Distinguished Professor before becoming emeritus professor in 1978.
Brown married Sarah Baylen, a fellow chemistry student, in 1937. Their son, Charles, followed in the family tradition and became a chemist. Brown wrote 4 books and more than 700 scientific papers. He died in Lafayette, Indiana, in 2004.