Frank Albert Cotton FRS (April 9, 1930 – February 20, 2007) was an American chemist. He was the W.T. Doherty-Welch Foundation Chair and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. He authored over 1600 scientific articles. Cotton was recognized for his research on the chemistry of the transition metals. Education Frank Albert Cotton (known as "Al" Cotton, or "F Albert" on publications) was born on April 9, 1930, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended local public schools before Drexel University and then Temple University. After earning his BA degree from Temple in 1951, Cotton pursued a Ph.D. thesis under the guidance of Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson at Harvard University where he worked on metallocenes. He received his Ph.D in 1955. Independent career Following his graduation from Harvard, Cotton began teaching at MIT. In 1961, at thirty-one years of age, he became the youngest person to have received a full professorship at MIT. His work emphasized both electronic structure and chemical synthesis. He pioneered the study of multiple bonding between transition metal atoms, starting with research on rhenium halides, and in 1964 identified the quadruple bond in the ion. His work soon focused on other metal-metal bonded species, elucidating the structure of chromium(II) acetate. He was an early proponent of single crystal X-ray diffraction as a tool for elucidating the extensive chemistry of metal complexes. Through his studies on clusters, he demonstrated that many exhibited "fluxionality", whereby ligands interchange coordination sites on spectroscopically observable time-scales. He coined the term "hapticity" and the nomenclature that derives from it. In 1962 he undertook the crystal structure of the Staphylococcal nuclease enzyme, solved to 2Å resolution in 1969, published in 1971, and deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB code 1SNS) as one of the first dozen protein crystal structures. In 1972 Cotton moved to Texas A&M University as the Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry. The following year he was named the Doherty-Welch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. He also served as the director of the university's Laboratory for Molecular Structure and Bonding. Pedagogical influence In addition to his research, Cotton taught inorganic chemistry. He authored Chemical Applications of Group Theory. This text focuses on group theoretical analysis of bonding and spectroscopy. Among college students, Cotton is perhaps best known as the coauthor of the textbook Advanced Inorganic Chemistry, now in its sixth English edition. Coauthored with his thesis advisor, Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson, and now