William Lipscomb

William N. Lipscomb Jr. received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of the structure and bonding of boron hydrides (boranes). His work explained how these electron-deficient molecules form stable bonds through three-center two-electron bonds, a concept that expanded conventional bonding theory.

Boron hydrides, or boranes, are compounds of boron and hydrogen that challenged conventional bonding theories because they appeared to have too few electrons for standard two-center two-electron bonds. Lipscomb showed that these molecules use three-center two-electron bonds, in which a single pair of electrons is shared among three atoms.

Lipscomb earned his PhD under Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954, profoundly influenced Lipscomb's approach to understanding chemical bonding and molecular structure.

After his PhD at Caltech, Lipscomb joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota before moving to Harvard University, where he spent the remainder of his career. At Harvard, he mentored several future Nobel laureates, including Roald Hoffmann, who received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.