The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
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.
