1. R.B Woodward was, in my opinion, the smartest chemist of the 20th century. He won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for bringing advancement to the field of organic synthesis.
2. He also co-authored with Geoffrey Wilkinson the seminal paper on the structure of ferrocene. Wilkinson went on to win the Nobel in 1973 (with Ernst Otto Fisher) for the work on ferrocene, but Woodward was left out. He complained, to no effect.
3. Woodward is also known for the Woodward-Hoffman rules, which were a unifying theory that governed a class of important reactions, the pericyclic reactions. Hoffman received a Nobel in 1980 (with Kenichi Fukui), but Woodward had passed away.
4. Woodward also worked on the cyclization of squalene oxide, the first step in the biosynthesis of cholesterol. His collaborator Konrad Bloch won the Nobel in Physiology in 1964.
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