The recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Olah is primarily known for his crucial work on reactive intermediates in hydrocarbons. The complex chemistry of hydrocarbons, compounds of carbon and hydrogen, includes the study of numerous reactions, which are sometimes extremely difficult to record. Reactive intermediates, or substances acting as the intermediate steps of a chemical reaction mechanism, are so short-lived and elusive that chemists used to regard them as purely hypothetical entities.

Before there was empirical evidence for the existence of reaction intermediates, chemists believed that carbon ions, or positively charged atoms, played an intermediary role in hydrocarbon reactions; the action of these intermediaries, however, was imagined to be so rapid, maybe measurable in millionths of a second, that scientists only postulated their existence. Olah, however, did not doubt the existence of reactive intermediates were real, deciding, in fact, to empirically prove their existence. In order to...