Arthur Michael (1853-1942)

American chemist, born in Buffalo (New York). An illness prevented him from entering Harvard, and he trained in Europe: in Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen, in Berlin under August Wilhelm von Hofmann, in Paris under Adolphe Wurtz and in Saint Petersburg under Dmitri Mendeleev. He never took a university degree.

He was professor at Tufts College, near Boston, and worked for years in private laboratories, one of them on the Isle of Wight. In 1912 he was appointed professor at Harvard University. He married one of his students, Helen Abbott, one of the few women organic chemists of the time.

In 1887 he published the addition of the anions of compounds such as diethyl malonate to α,β-unsaturated esters, the Michael addition, one of the most useful ways of making C–C bonds. He was also one of the first chemists interested in reaction mechanisms. He died in 1942.