Peter Atkins, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, University of Oxford, UK, celebrates his 80th birthday on August 10, 2020. He is well-known as the author of widely used textbooks, e.g., for physical and inorganic chemistry, and has also authored many popular-science books.

Peter Atkins was born in 1940 in Amersham, UK. He studied chemistry at the University of Leicester, UK, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1964 for work on electron spin resonance spectroscopy. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Califonia, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA, and returned to the UK in 1965, where he joined Lincoln College at the University of Oxford as Lecturer in Physical Chemistry. He became Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University in 1996 and remained at the university until his retirement in 2007. Since then, he has worked as a full-time author.

Among other honors, Atkins has received the Meldola Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in 1969, the James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public from the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2016, a Fellowship of the RSC, and several honorary doctorates.

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Selected Publications

• Atkins’ Physical Chemistry,
  Peter Atkins, Julio de Paula, James Keeler,
  Oxford University Press, 2018.
  ISBN: 978-0-198-76986-6
• Physikalische Chemie (in German),
  Peter Atkins, Julio de Paula (Translated by Michael Bär),
  Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2013.
  ISBN: 978-3-527-33247-2
• Molecular Quantum Mechanics,
  Peter Atkins, Ronald S. Friedman,
  Oxford University Press, 2010.
  ISBN: 978-0-199-54142-3
• Shriver & Atkins’ Inorganic Chemistry,
  Peter Atkins, Tina Overton, Jonathan Rourke, Mark Weller, Fraser Armstrong,
  Oxford University Press, 2010.
  ISBN: 978-0-199-23617-6
• Chemie – einfach alles (in German),
  Peter Atkins, Loretta Jones,
  Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2006.
  ISBN: 978-3-527-31579-6
• Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science,
  Peter Atkins,
  Oxford University Press, 2004.
  ISBN: 978-0-198-60941-4
• The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into The Land Of The Chemical Elements,
  Peter Atkins,
  Basic Books,1997.
  ISBN: 978-0-465-07266-8

Also of Interest

• Video: Wissenschaftsforum: P. Atkins on Visualizing Chemistry,
  Vera Köster,
  ChemistryViews.org 2011.
  Peter Atkins, author of many chemistry textbooks, talks about the importance of illustrations in chemistry