Malcolm L. H. Green: Reminiscences and Appreciations

Abstract

We are greatly pleased to participate in this special issue of Inorganica Chimica Acta celebrating Malcolm Green. Having no new science worthy of the occasion to report (and feeling no great urge to recycle older work yet one more time), we offer instead a brief appreciation of Malcolm's contributions to inorganic chemistry, as well as what he has meant to us throughout our careers, both personally and professionally. Malcolm was one of the earliest products of the Geoffrey Wilkinson school of organotransition metal chemistry, a group which, as one of us has documented [1], was a major factor in the mid-20th century "renaissance" of inorganic chemistry, in which Malcolm himself played no small part. Many of his early studies, both during his graduate student days and in his independent career at Oxford (following a brief sojourn at Cambridge), were focused on bent metallocenes and transition metal hydride complexes (often both): papers that had a significant influence on our own research programs. But even more importantly, his special ability to identify and delineate patterns of structure and reactivity was central to the transformation of organotransition metal chemistry, from a collection of interesting but poorly understood observations to the systematic and powerfully unified field it is today.

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