UK Loses Alumnus, Nobel Laureate
LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 15, 2011) – University of Kentucky chemistry alumnus William Nunn Lipscomb, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Harvard and winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died Thursday, April 14, at the age of 91 in Cambridge, Mass.
His daughter-in-law, Margaret Lipscomb, told the Boston Globe the cause of death was pneumonia and other complications after a fall.
Lipscomb was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but spent the majority of his childhood and his undergraduate years in Lexington and Central Kentucky.
Lipscomb's early interest in astronomy led him to UK's observatory and a lifelong friendship with UK professor H.H. Downing. "He gave me a copy of Baker's 'Astronomy' which I read many times," Lipscomb said in his autobiographical reflection. "I am sure that I gained many intuitive concepts of physics from this book, and from my conversations with him."
Lipscomb, who came from a musical family, pursued his love of music at UK as well and attended UK on a music scholarship. “There’s a lot of music in my life,” Lipscomb told the Nobel e-Museum, “and I found it a very important part of my life. Sometimes I get too wound up in my chemistry, but if you play chamber music it’s impossible to think about chemistry.”
After earning his bachelor's degree in chemistry at UK, Lipscomb entered the California Institute of Technology in 1941, intending to study physics. After earning his doctorate in chemistry at Caltech in 1946 under the influence of Linus Pauling, Lipscomb taught at the University of Minnesota until 1959, when he went to Harvard.
During World War II, Lipscomb worked for the War Department’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, specializing in rocketry.
Lipscomb won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on boranes, a group of unstable compounds of hydrogen and boron.
Using X-ray diffraction and quantum mechanics, Lipscomb identified boranes, and in doing so, he not only vastly expanded what was known about their molecular properties, but he also offered new insights into the workings of chemical bonding in general. Lipscomb's study had practical implications as well, furthering knowledge of how complex molecules bond at very low temperatures, such as those found in outer space.
Lipscomb's honors, fellowships, memberships and lectures are too great in number to fully catalog, but his awards at UK include a Sullivan Medallion in 1941; a Distinguished Alumni Centennial Award in 1965; Inaugural Outstanding Alumni Award in 1999; and most recently the naming of the William N. Lipscomb, Jr. High Performance Computing Cluster, a 40 teraflop Dell supercomputer, in 2010.
MEDIA CONTACT: Erin Holaday Ziegler, (859) 257-1754, ext. 252; erin.holaday@uky.edu