Sir Harold (Harry) Walter Kroto (1939-2016)

摘要

Harry Kroto was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England on October 7, 1939, son of Edith and Heinz Krotoschiner, German refugees to the UK where his mother had been evacuated on the outbreak of war. Harry's family name stems from a town in Silesia, where his Jewish father's family originated. However, his parents were both born in Berlin and his father, as an enemy alien, was interned on the Isle of Man during the war. As a baby Harry and his mother were moved to Bolton in Lancashire in 1940. In Germany, Kroto's father had run a family business printing faces and other images on toy balloons and, after the war, he became a toolmaker at an engineering company in Bolton and then, in 1955, set up his own small factory, again making balloons as well as printing them. He then shortened the family name to Kroto. Harry spent much of his school holiday time working in the factory. His education was at the Bolton School Boys' Division, where he showed a particular talent for graphic design and art; he played the Duke of York to school mate Ian McKellen's Henry V in a school play. After gaining his Advanced School Certificate, Harry entered the University of Sheffield in 1958 where his interests moved from organic chemistry to quantum chemistry and spectroscopy gaining him his BSc and PhD (1964) (Thesis: The Spectroscopy of Free Radicals produced by Flash Photolysis). Kroto then spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in electronic and microwave spectroscopy at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada and a year at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey prior to joining the University of Sussex, initially as a postdoctoral researcher and soon appointed to a lectureship there. He was elevated to a professorship in 1985.