The Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the "Buckyball" visits Dublin next week to deliver an Academy Times lecture on his work.
Sir Harry Kroto's free public talk is organised jointly by the Royal Irish Academy, The Irish Times and the British Council.
Kroto shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996 with US scientists Robert Curl Jr and Richard Smalley for their discovery of and subsequent work on carbon 60, the spherical molecule with the most unusual name, buckminsterfullerene.
C60 is named after American engineering and architectural genius, Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1985). His signature building structure is the geodesic dome, a truncated icosahedron that blends 32 five-sided and six-sided elements.
The three scientists weren't looking for C60 at the time, they were trying to understand long linear carbon chain molecules identified in the laboratory, but more curiously out in interstellar space and in stars. Their efforts to rationalise their abundance in space in turn revealed C60, the first fullerene to be discovered.
Fullerenes have since become an important subject for advanced research given their promising use as nanotubes in chemistry, medicine and nanotechnology. They have been made into nanowires and other nanostructures at dimensions measured in billionths of a metre across.
Born in 1939 in Cambridgeshire, Sir Harry has worked in the US, Canada and Britain and is currently professor of chemistry at the University of Sussex. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and is chairman of the board of the Vega Science Trust, which produces science programmes for network television.
The talk is one of a series organised by the Academy and The Irish Times to mark 2005 as the Hamilton Year, celebrating the work of Ireland's greatest scientist, William Rowan Hamilton, in association with DEPFA Bank plc.
Sir Harry delivers his Academy Times lecture at 6.30 p.m. in the Burke Lecture Theatre, Arts Block, Trinity College, Dublin, on February 4th. There is no charge, but places must be booked as space is limited. Bookings may be placed on the RIA's website, www.ria.ie
Dick Ahlstrom