Kroto, Harry (Sir Harold Walter Kroto), 1939–2016, British chemist, b. Harold Walter Krotoschiner, Ph.D. Univ. of Sheffield, 1964. Kroto was the son of German parents who fled Nazi rule to England. He was a member of the faculty at Univ. of Sussex from 1967 to 2004, when he became professor emeritus, and also was a professor at Florida State Univ. from 2004 until his death. He was corecipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for the discovery of fullerenes, which are carbon atoms bound in the form of a structure that looks like a soccer ball. The work opened up new avenues of research in chemistry, including efforts to exploit the unique properties of these materials in nanotechnology.
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