George A. Olah

George A. Olah (1927-2017) was a Hungarian-American chemist who taught in Budapest, worked at Dow Chemical in Canada, then at Case Western Reserve University before joining the University of Southern California in 1977. His research on generating and studying carbocations using superacids, including the discovery of protonated methane stabilized under superacid conditions, opened these highly reactive species to direct spectroscopic study and led to new catalytic applications. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994 for his contributions to carbocation chemistry.