Obituary: Sir Harry Kroto

Professor Harry Kroto, who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996 with Rick Smalley and Robert Curl, has died at the age of 76 after a long illness. His 1996 Nobel award was in recognition of his work on fullerenes – commonly referred
to as ‘buckyballs’, a pure form of carbon that presented itself in the form of a polyhedron composed of 60 carbon atoms.
Harry was born Harold Walter Krotoschiner on 7th October 1939 in the small market town of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England. Both parents had come to Britain as refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His Jewish father was held on the Isle of Man as an ‘enemy alien’ for the duration of the war. Harry and his mother moved to Bolton, Lancashire, in 1940. This is where the family eventually settled at the end of World War II, when his father joined them again.