Linus Pauling

Also known as Linus Carl Pauling, Linus C. Pauling

American scientist (1901–1994)

OverviewAI-generated

Linus Pauling was born on February 28, 1901, and died on August 19, 1994. He received two Nobel Prizes. His Erdős number is 4.

His work is included in several collections. These include the Royal Society collection, the Nobel Laureates collection, the Nobel Chemistry collection, the Nobel Peace collection, the American Academy Arts Sciences collection, and the National Medal Of Science collection.

Synthesized by Vinony from 11 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Nobel Prizes (2)

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry1954
“for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances”
The Nobel Peace Prize1962
“for his fight against the nuclear arms race between East and West”

NobelPrize.org →

Wikidata facts

Instance of: human
Given name: Carl
Gender: male
Citizenship: United States
Place of birth: Portland
Place of death: Big Sur
Spouse: Ava Helen Pauling
Occupation: activist shareholder
Position held: professor
Educated at: Oregon State University
Employer: Oregon State University
Languages spoken: English language
Religion: atheism
Award: California Hall of Fame
Doctoral advisor: Richard Chace Tolman
Student of: Arnold Sommerfeld
Field of work: physical chemistry
Movement: atheism
Official website: scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/digitalresources/pauling
Image: Linus Pauling 1962.jpg
Work location: Palo Alto
Residence: Lake Oswego

Show 17 more facts

maintained by WikiProject: WikiProject Mathematics
member of: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei
date of birth: 1901-02-28
date of death: 1994-08-19
Commons category: Linus Pauling
Commons gallery: Linus Pauling
cause of death: prostate cancer
Erdős number: 4
manner of death: natural causes
influenced by: Walter Heitler
nominated for: Nobel Peace Prize
name in native language: Linus Carl Pauling
on focus list of Wikimedia project: Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
archive URL: scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/index.html
P8168: East Londonderry
has characteristic: Nobel disease
interested in: physics

Sources (15)

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Encyclopedic overview

Linus Carl Pauling (/ˈpɔːlɪŋ/ PAW-ling; February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994) was an American chemist and peace activist. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. Scientific American called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time. For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of five people to have won more than one Nobel Prize. Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.

Pauling was one of the founders of the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology. His contributions to the theory of the chemical bond include the concept of orbital hybridisation and the first accurate scale of electronegativities of the elements. Pauling also worked on the structures of biological molecules, and showed the importance of the alpha helix and beta sheet in protein secondary structure. Pauling's approach combined methods and results from X-ray crystallography, molecular model building, and quantum chemistry. His discoveries inspired the work of James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins on the structure of DNA, which in turn made it possible for geneticists to crack the DNA code of all organisms.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Linus Pauling” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.