Thomas Joseph Katz

Professor of Chemistry.  The first syntheses of 10-pi aromatics (and corollaries providing underpinnings for the relationships between hyperfine splittings and spin densities and NMR chemical shifts and charge densities), of prismane, of pentaalkylphosphorus compounds, of metallocenes having more than one metal or that are helical, of oligomeric helicenes, and of helicenes and benzvalene in quantity; the first demonstrations of isolable metal-carbenes alone initiating olefin metatheses, acetylene polymerizations, and enyne-metatheses (a transformation he discovered), of rhodium catalyzed cycloadditions, of the current photocyclization procedure, of the induced kinetic isotope effect, of the mechanism of metal-catalyzed cycloadditions, of the stereochemistry of olefin metatheses, and, by making the consequences plain of metal-carbenes adding selectively to one end of an olefin, of how olefin-metatheses work.   He also devised procedures that generate NSN and that analyze enantiomeric purity, and he analyzed a variety of molecular properties, including the optical properties of twisted materials, the very different rates by which the cyclo-C₈H₈ anion exchanges electrons with its hydrocarbon and dianion, and the extent of cross-ring conjugation in cyclobutenyl cations and in the cyclo-C₉H₁₀ anion.