George A. Olah was born 1927 in Budapest, Hungary, received his Ph.D. degree at the Technical University in Budapest in 1949 and held several academic positions there and at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Chemistry. In 1957 he moved to North America and became a research chemist at the Dow Chemical Company in Canada and then in the USA. He was appointed Professor at Case Western Reserve University at Cleveland, Ohio in 1965 and since 1977 has been a professor at the University of Southern California. In 1991 he became Director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute.