Sandwich Compounds of Transition Metals

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the death of Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson (1921–1996), who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Ernst Otto Fischer (b. 1918) “for their pioneering work, performed independently, on the chemistry of the organometallic, so-called sandwich compounds,” this article recounts Wilkinson’s life and achievements with an emphasis on his work on organometallic compounds, his coauthorship of the bestselling inorganic text, “Cotton and Wilkinson,” and his other services to inorganic chemistry, including his founding of Polyhedron: The International Journal for Inorganic and Organometallic Chemistry (1981).