Paul Flory

Paul John Flory (June 19, 1910 to September 9, 1985) was an American chemist born in Sterling, Illinois, who died in Big Sur, California. He won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his fundamental theoretical and experimental achievements in the physical chemistry of macromolecules, establishing much of the statistical and thermodynamic framework used to describe how polymer chains behave in solution and in bulk. Flory's career took him through DuPont, Cornell University and Stanford University, and his textbook Principles of Polymer Chemistry became a foundational reference for the field he helped define.