Editorial: Tribute to Yves Chauvin

This issue of OGST is dedicated to the memory of Yves Chauvin, a major figure of French chemistry who died on January 27, 2015.Yves Chauvin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2005 and described on this occasion, with characteristic humor, his career and his vision [1].Yves Chauvin chose chemistry by chance, but was already convinced that it was possible to dive with passion into work, whatever that work was.He expresses regret of not having pursued his studies to a PhD, mentioning that it would have required the selection of a good advisor and a good topic, two rather difficult tasks when one totally lacks experience in these matters.During the two years he spent in industry, Yves Chauvin noted that those in charge were "fearing change" and were wishing above all to reproduce what was done elsewhere -"since we know that it works".For Yves Chauvin, the goal was rather to develop something new, and to seek what was original and innovative.He noted with finesse that there stands the contradiction of research: one is to rely on prior knowledge gained by predecessors, while standing ready to depart from it "at the right time".Yves Chauvin joined the Institut Français du Pétrole in 1960 and managed to work on matters that he considered were the most interesting, thus avoiding the well-marked areas, too widely explored, which could only lead to minor improvements.At that time, the oil refining industry mainly relied on heterogeneous catalysis.Yves Chauvin "naturally" became a specialist of homogeneous catalysis by developing molecular catalysis, from its basic principles to its industrial applications, even introducing it in the refining sector.He demonstrated its advantages in two processes, the first of which, dimersol, based on a nickel catalyst, allowed the dimerization of propylene to isohexene, and the other, alphabutol, used a titaniumbased catalyst that allowed the dimerization of ethylene to 1-butene.This work led to the commercialization of more than 100 references of homogeneous catalytic processes (ref.Axens), with production levels reaching in the millions of tons per year.By skillfully combining basic and applied research, Yves Chauvin contributed to the development of many areas of chemistry and catalysis, both on the academic level and in the industrial sector.Yves Chauvin had a taste for difficult issues and he assumed the risks associated with the extrapolation to the industrial scale: "The slightest failure is final but success brings so much happiness that the risk is well worth the attempt".In the 70s, the brilliant intuition of Yves Chauvin lead to the discovery of the olefin metathesis reaction mechanism, a series of processes in which molecules containing a carbon-carbon double bond exchange atoms, somewhat in the manner of dancing couples exchanging partners.Yves Chauvin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this reaction, a prize he shared with Robert H. Grubbs and Richard Schrock.These pioneering investigations still impact the entire

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