Walden inversion
Inversión de Walden
- Date
- 1896 · confidence high
- Place
- Riga, Latvia
- Credited to
- Paul Walden
- Field
- Matter & energy
What was discovered
A reaction in which a chiral compound exchanges a group and yields the opposite enantiomer, so that the configuration is inverted. It helped explain the geometry of substitution reactions.
Walden worked at the Riga Polytechnic, in the Russian Empire. In 1914 he also synthesised ethylammonium nitrate, regarded as the first room-temperature ionic liquid.
What it led to
- the SN2 mechanism of Hughes and Ingold in the 1930s
- stereochemistry of organic reactions
- asymmetric synthesis