The Foundations of Physical Organic Chemistry ─ Fifty Years of the James Flack Norris Award

This book examines the history and fundamentals of the physical organic chemistry discipline. With the recent flowering of the organic synthesis field, physical organic chemistry has seemed to be shrinking or perhaps is just being absorbed into the toolkit of the synthetic chemist. The only Nobel Prize that can be reasonably attributed to a physical organic chemist is the 1994 award to George Olah, although Jeffrey I. Seeman has recently made a strong case that R. B. Woodward was actually a physical organic chemist in disguise (I).

2014 saw the awarding of the 50th James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry. James Flack Norris was an early physical organic chemist, before the discipline received its name. This book provides insight into the fundamentals of the field, and each chapter is devoted to a major discovery or to noted physical organic chemists, including Paul Schleyer, William Doering, and Glen A. Russell.

Dr. E. Thomas (Tom) Strom is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), where he teaches organic and polymer chemistry. He came to UTA after retiring from Mobil in Dallas, where he worked 32 years as a research chemist studying oil field chemistry. He was Chair of the ACS Division of the History of Chemistry in 2011-2012. His research interests are in the history of chemistry and the study of anion radicals by electron spin resonance spectroscopy. He received his B.S.Chem degree from the University of Iowa, his M.S.Chem degree in nuclear chemistry from UC-Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry from Iowa State University working under mentor Glen A. Russell. Previously he has co-edited two volumes in the ACS Symposium Series.

Dr. Vera Mainz is retired Director of the NMR Lab in the School of Chemical Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics at Kansas Newman College (1976), a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley (1981, with R. A. Andersen), spent 1-1/2 years working at Rohm and Haas in Springhouse, PA, and had a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1983-1985) before becoming Director of the NMR Lab. She was elected to the position of Secretary-Treasurer of the History of Chemistry Division (HIST) of the ACS in 1995, and has served as Secretary-Treasurer since that time.