Erich Clar (23 August 1902 in
Hřensko
Hřensko (german: Herrnskretschen) is a municipality and village in Děčín District in the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 300 inhabitants.
Administrative parts
The village of Mezná is an administrative part of Hřen ...
– 27 March 1987 in
Estepona
Estepona () is a town and municipality in the comarca of the Costa del Sol, southern Spain. It is located in the province of Málaga, part of the autonomous community of Andalusia. Its district covers an area of 137 square kilometers in a fertile ...
) was an Austrian
organic chemist
Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and organic materials, i.e., matter in its various forms that contain carbon atoms.Clayden, J. ...
who studied
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon
A polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) is a class of organic compounds that is composed of multiple aromatic rings. The simplest representative is naphthalene, having two aromatic rings and the three-ring compounds anthracene and phenanthrene. ...
chemistry. He is considered as the father of that field. In 1941, he authored "Aromatische Kohlenwasserstoffe" (Springer-Verlag) and in 1964 the greatly expanded two-volume ''Polycyclic Hydrocarbons'', which described the syntheses, properties, and UV-visible absorption spectra of hundreds of PAHs. He discovered the Clar reaction of the cyclic ketone perinaphthenone to form dibenzo
d,lmerylene in a 400 C melt of zinc dust, zinc (II) chloride, and sodium chloride. He created the Sextet Theory, now eponymously called ''
Clar's rule
In organic and physical organic chemistry, Clar's rule is an empirical rule that relates the chemical stability of a molecule with its aromaticity. It was introduced in 1972 by the Austrian organic chemist Erich Clar in his book ''The Aromat ...
'', to describe the behavior of
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon
A polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) is a class of organic compounds that is composed of multiple aromatic rings. The simplest representative is naphthalene, having two aromatic rings and the three-ring compounds anthracene and phenanthrene. ...
isomers. This was described in his book ''The Aromatic Sextet''. He was awarded the
August Kekulé Medal by the
Chemical Society of the GDR in 1965, the highest award given by that society to foreign scientists, and the first Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Research Award of the International Symposium on Polynuclear Aromatic Hydrocarbons in 1987.
See also
*
Clar's hydrocarbon
*
Clar's rule
In organic and physical organic chemistry, Clar's rule is an empirical rule that relates the chemical stability of a molecule with its aromaticity. It was introduced in 1972 by the Austrian organic chemist Erich Clar in his book ''The Aromat ...
*
Iptycene
References
1902 births
1987 deaths
20th-century German chemists
Organic chemists
People from Děčín District
TU Dresden alumni
Academics of the University of Glasgow
German emigrants to Scotland
Sudeten German people
{{chemist-stub