Rudolph Marcus was born in Montréal, Quebec. Beginning in 1956, he wrote a series of papers over a nine-year period developing what is now called the Marcus theory, which was later experimentally verified. Applications of his theory include such phenomena as photosynthesis, electrically conducting polymers, chemiluminescence and corrosion. He won the Nobel Prize in 1992.
BSc; PhD (chemistry), McGill U. 1946; came to US in 1949, naturalized 1958; postdoctoral research Nat. Rsch. Council, Can., & U. of N. Carolina; asst. prof. Polytechnic Inst., 1951; prof., 1958; div. of physical chem., U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1964; Caltech, 1978. Other areas of contribution: unimolecular reactions and intramolecular dynamics, semiclassical theories of bound vibrational states and of collisions, and vibrational adiabaticity in reaction dynamics.
Sources: Physics Today, Jan 1993; Who's Who in America, 1994
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