Robert Mulliken’s Nobel prize medal latest to go up for auction

The Nobel prize medal awarded to the US physical chemist Robert Mulliken will be auctioned off at the end of July.

Mulliken, who died in 1986, was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1966 for his work on molecular orbital theory – a method for describing the electronic structure of molecules using quantum mechanics. Mulliken’s key insights into the theory were first published in the 1920s, and he is also credited with introducing several terms to the chemistry vocabulary, including ‘orbital’, ‘σ-electron’ and ‘π-electron’.