Gilbert Newton Lewis
Name in native script: Gilbert Newton Lewis
1875–1946, Weymouth, Massachusetts, United States, Berkeley, California, United States
American physical chemist who established the electron-pair account of covalent bonding and defined Lewis acids and bases; he also developed the concept of fugacity.
Lewis was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, studied at the University of Nebraska and Harvard, and later worked at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. His thermodynamic research introduced fugacity into the description of chemical equilibria, extending chemical potential to real gases.
In 1916 he presented covalent bonding as a shared pair of electrons; in 1923 he formulated acids as electron-pair acceptors and bases as donors. Lewis dot structures became a basic tool of chemistry. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize many times but never received one.
Workplaces: University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
United States