Michael Franz Lappert, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, Sussex, UK, passed away on March 28, 2014.
Michael Lappert, born on December 31, 1928, studied at Northern Polytechnic, London, UK, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1951. He was then appointed as a lecturer of organic chemistry at this instituion and later became a senior lecturer. From 1959–1964, he worked as a lecturer of inorganic chemistry at University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), UK. In 1964, he joined the faculty of the University of Sussex, initially as a reader before he was promoted to professor in 1969. He continued to carry out research there past the formal retirement age, leading a small research group.
Lappert was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, UK, in 1979. In the course of his career he won a number of awards including the first Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Medal for Main Group Chemistry in 1970, the F. S. Kipping Award of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 1976, and the Alfred Stock Memorial Prize from the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh; German Chemical Society) in 2008.
Lappert’s research was focused in the area of coordination and organometallic chemistry, including studies on low coordination numbers and metal amido complexes. He is best known for his work on novel lipophilic organic compounds of a lot of the natural elements. This involved their synthesis, structure determination, and investigations into their reactivity and included his earlier research into boron chemistry encompassing the discoveries of [BC14]–, the BN-cyclobutadiene analogues, BC13 as a reagent in organic chemistry, restricted rotation about BN bonds, and BN polymers.
Selected publications by Lappert:
- Syntheses and Structures of the Crystalline, Highly Crowded 1,3-Bis(trimethylsilyl)cyclopentadienyls [MCp″3] (M = Y, Er, Yb), [PbCp″2], [{YCp″2(μ-OH)}2], [(ScCp″2)2(μ-η2:η2-C2H4)], [YbCp″2Cl(μ-Cl)K(18-crown-6)], and [{KCp″}∞],
Martyn P. Coles, Peter B. Hitchcock, Michael F. Lappert, Andrey V. Protchenko,
Organometallics 2012, 31, 2682–2690.
DOI: 10.1021/om2009364 - Synthesis and Structures of Five Crystalline Organometallic (Li/Y, Mg/Mg) or Coordination (Mg, CrII, Y/Y) Complexes,
Xue-Hong Wei, Martyn P. Coles, Peter B. Hitchcock, Michael F. Lappert,
Z. Anorg. Allg. Chem. 2011, 637, 1807–1813.
DOI: 10.1002/zaac.201100266 - Varied Reactions of [M(L)]3 with HgCl2, FeBr2, CeCl3, AgOTf; Ligand Transfer, Nucleophilic Attack with Recombination and/or Fragmentation [M = Li or Na; L = N(SiMe3){C(H)N}3SiMe3],
W. Marco Boesveld, Peter B. Hitchcock, Michael F. Lappert,
Inorg. Chem. 2009, 48, 11444–1145.
DOI: 10.1021/ic901687a
