Henri B. Kagan (1930)
French chemist born in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris. He obtained his doctorate in 1960 at the Collège de France and in 1968 set up his laboratory in Orsay, at the University of Paris-Sud, where he is professor emeritus. In 1971 he described DIOP, a chiral diphosphine derived from tartaric acid, whose C2 symmetry became the model for many later ligands.
He introduced samarium(II) iodide, SmI2, as a reducing agent in organic synthesis, and in 1986 discovered nonlinear effects in asymmetric catalysis. For this last discovery he shared the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kensō Soai.
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