Nathan Kornblum

Nathan Kornblum was born in New York City on March 22, 1914 to immigrant parents, Frances (Newmark) and Samuel Kornblum. He died March 13, 1993 at his home in West Lafayette (Tippecanoe County), IN. He was a professor of Organic Chemistry and a researcher at Purdue University, IN, and received grants for projects from 1970-1983. His main research focus was electron transfer substitution reactions. His most famous work was the discovery of the Kornblum oxidation and also the Kornblum substitution. He was also known for Kornblum's rule in acid-base chemistry. He was the Plutonium chapter advisor for Iota Sigma Pi Honors Society for Women in Chemistry, which was established in February 1963. In 1952, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship award. He authored a chapter in an Organic Reactions textbook which was published in 2011, and wrote a review entitled "Synthetic Aspects of Electron-Transfer Chemistry" which was published in 1990 by Sigma-Aldrich.