Alan Roy Katritzky. 18 August 1928 — 10 February 2014

Abstract

After a bright start, first in Oxford and then in Cambridge, Alan Katritzky’s scientific career was spent at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where he became the founding Professor of Chemistry (1962) and at the University of Florida in Gainesville, USA, in the Kenan Chair of Chemistry from 1980 until his death in 2014. For more than 60 years he was a pioneer in the development of the field of heterocyclic chemistry. His work contributed much to the science that underpins the synthetic work of the modern pharmaceutical and agrichemical industries as well as that of dyestuffs and polymers. His research also touched other areas such as physical organic and polymer chemistry, organic reaction mechanisms, spectroscopy, chemical sensors, peptide synthesis, and reactions in water at high temperatures and pressures. Alan Katritzky worked with large cohorts of graduate students and research fellows drawn from across the globe. Their work was reported in nearly 2200 papers published in the primary scientific literature. He was also very active in the publishing field, writing and editing monographs and reviews, maintaining this prodigious level of output until a few days before he died.