Geoffrey Wilkinson

Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson  was a Nobel laureate English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis. Wilkinson was born at Springside, Todmorden, in the West Riding of Yorkshire  on14 July 1921.

His father, Henry Wilkinson, was a master house painter and decorator; his mother, Ruth, worked in a local cotton mill. He was educated at the local council primary school and, after winning a County Scholarship in 1932, went to Todmorden Grammar School.

His physics teacher there, Luke Sutcliffe, had also taught Sir John Cockcroft, who received a Nobel Prize for "splitting the atom". In 1939 he obtained a Royal Scholarship for study at Imperial College London, from where he graduated in 1941, with his PhD awarded in 1946. Wilkinson received many awards, including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 for his work on "organometallic compounds" (with Ernst Otto Fischer) .