Harry Kroto
British chemist (1939-2016)
Sir Harold Walter Kroto (born Harold Walter Krotoschiner; 7 October 1939 – 30 April 2016) was an English chemist. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes. He was the recipient of many other honors and awards.
Kroto ended his career as the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University, which he joined in 2004. Prior to this, he spent approximately 40 years at the University of Sussex.
Kroto promoted science education and was a critic of religious faith.
Early years
Kroto was born in Wisbech, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, to Edith and Heinz Krotoschiner, his name being of Silesian origin. His father's family came from Bojanowo, Poland, and his mother's from Berlin. Both of his parents were born in Berlin and fled to Great Britain in the 1930s as refugees from Nazi Germany; his father was Jewish. Harry was raised in Bolton while the British authorities interned his father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien during World War II. Kroto attended Bolton School, where he was a contemporary of the actor Ian McKellen.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harry Kroto” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.