Taube, Henry, 1915–2005, American inorganic chemist, b. Saskatchewan, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1940, taught at Cornell from 1941. became a U.S. citizen in 1942, joined the faculty at Univ. of Chicago in 1946, and then moved to Stanford in 1962 (emeritus from 1986). He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering research in inorganic chemistry and the study of the rates and mechanisms of transition-metal coordination compounds. Taube determined that certain octahedral complexes containing transition-metals are inert while others are labile, depending upon whether they undergo ligand-substitution reactions rapidly or slowly.
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