Arthur C. Cope (1909-1966)

American chemist, born in Indiana. He studied at Butler University and obtained his doctorate in 1932 at the University of Wisconsin under S. M. McElvain; he then worked at Harvard with E. P. Kohler. He taught at Bryn Mawr College and Columbia University and, from 1945 and for almost twenty years, headed the Chemistry Department at MIT.

At Bryn Mawr he discovered the Cope rearrangement of 1,5-dienes (1940), for which he received the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry in 1944. The Cope elimination of amine oxides also bears his name. The oxy-Cope variant, the one on this page, was described by J. A. Berson and M. Jones in 1964.

He was president of the American Chemical Society (1961) and left half of his estate to the society to fund research in organic chemistry, which gave rise to the Arthur C. Cope Awards. He died in Washington in 1966.