Polanyi, John Charles

Polanyi, John Charles, 1929–, Canadian chemist. Raised and educated in England, he worked as a researcher in Canada before taking a teaching position at the Univ. of Toronto in 1956. He used spectroscopy as a means to detect the infrared light emitted by molecules during chemical reactions. Polanyi shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Dudley Herschbach and Yuan Lee .

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