Abstract
Dr. W. H. Mills, recently elected president of the Chemical Society, has for a long time been one of the outstanding figures in the scientific world: his influence on chemistry at Cambridge has been profound. An independent thinker, his researches bear no resemblance to those of his teachers: he founded a ‘school’, but he never had a ‘team’. A paper by Mills is something to be read not only for instruction, but also for the intellectual pleasure it gives. His work on the cyanines, the photographic sensitizing dyes, was largely responsible for settling their chemistry, to which his former student, Dr. Hamer, has added so much. But it is for his stereochemical work that Mills is best known. In 1910 and 1914, with Miss Bain, he demonstrated the configuration of the doubly linked nitrogen atom, adding compelling evidence in 1923, with Schindler, and in 1931 with Saunders. The proof, with Warren, of the tetrahedral configuration of the ammonium ion compares for elegance with the proof, with Quibell and Lidstone, of the planar configuration of the 4–co–ordinated platinous and palladous atoms. The resolution of an allene, with Maitland, was also a remarkable achievement.
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Chemical Society: New President. Nature 148, 465 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148465a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148465a0