Gilbert N. Lewis

Gilbert N. Lewis was an American physical chemist whose work shaped chemical thermodynamics and modern theories of chemical bonding, including the electron-pair bond and the Lewis structure.

Lewis structure: A diagram showing valence electrons and bonds in a molecule or ion. Lewis developed this notation to represent shared electron pairs and molecular bonding.
Lewis acid: A species that accepts an electron pair to form a chemical bond. Lewis broadened acid chemistry beyond proton transfer with this electron-pair definition.
Irving Langmuir: An American chemist who developed and popularized theories of chemical bonding and surface chemistry. Langmuir extended Lewis’s electron-pair ideas and helped make them influential.
Physical chemistry: The branch of chemistry that explains chemical systems using physical principles and measurements. Lewis helped shape this field through work on thermodynamics, equilibrium, and molecular structure.
Covalent bond: A chemical bond formed when atoms share electron pairs. Lewis’s electron-pair model gave a foundational account of this bond.
Lewis base: A species that donates an electron pair to form a chemical bond. This is the electron-pair donor counterpart in Lewis’s acid–base theory.
Walther Nernst: A German physical chemist known for work on thermodynamics and the Nernst heat theorem. Lewis’s thermodynamic research engaged with questions raised by Nernst’s theorem.
Chemical bonding: The interactions that hold atoms together in molecules and extended materials. His electron-pair theory became a major framework for explaining covalent bonding.
Valence electron: An electron in an atom’s outermost shell that can participate in bonding. Lewis used outer-shell electrons to explain how atoms form chemical bonds.
Electron pair: Two electrons occupying the same orbital or participating together in a bond. Lewis treated a shared pair as the central unit of covalent bonding.

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