John C. Bailar Jr.

John C. Bailar Jr. (1904-1991) was an American inorganic chemist, long a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, often called the father of coordination chemistry in the United States because the field received little attention there before his work. The Bailar twist, a proposed mechanism for the rearrangement of certain coordination compounds, is named for him, and he helped found the book series Inorganic Syntheses and the journal Inorganic Chemistry. He received the Priestley Medal and served as president of the American Chemical Society.