She was born on 16 July 1914.

She is the 8th known OLP in France.

Happy 112th Birthday!

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/science/rudolph-marcus-dead.html
Dylan Loeb McClain

Rudolph Marcus, a Canadian-born American chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a theory that helped explain the electrochemical processes behind photosynthesis, respiration, oxidation and even how fireflies produce light, died on Thursday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 102.

His death was announced by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he had taught since 1978. Sarah Reisman, the chair of the chemistry and chemical engineering division at Caltech, said that it was almost impossible to overstate the importance of Dr. Marcus’s work.

“It provides a simple theory for one of the most fundamental processes in chemistry and has been applied to understand reactions ranging from small-molecule catalysts to proteins involved in photosynthesis,” she wrote in an email.

Dr. Marcus was a theoretical chemist and not an experimentalist. He discovered early in his career that he did not like performing experiments, preferring to conceive explanations for mysterious phenomena, he explained in a 2016 podcast.

“It all comes back to the puzzles, I think, and the enjoyment of puzzles as a child,” he said, adding, “Only now the puzzles are scientific puzzles.”

The puzzle Dr. Marcus solved that led to his winning the Nobel in 1992 concerned electron transfer reactions — “the simplest” of all chemical reactions, he said because “there are no bonds that are broken or formed, just simply an electron is transferred from one reactant to another.”

He stumbled upon the subject in 1955 while teaching at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (which, after a merger, is now New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering). While leafing through magazines in the library, he read an article by the future Nobel laureate Willard Libby, that explained why some electron transfers occurred at faster speeds than others (and, to some degree, why they occurred at all).

Dr. Libby’s ideas were based on a phenomenon first observed in the 1920s, in which shining a light on atoms would give them enough energy to spontaneously emit electrons, a process so fast that the nuclei would not change positions. Dr. Libby suggested that the same thing happened in electron transfers.

Dr. Marcus thought that Dr. Libby’s idea of how electrons can be emitted without disturbing the nuclei was promising, except for one glaring problem: Where did the energy come from to support the emission? In the 1920s experiment, the source of that energy was light, in the form of photons. But what about reactions that happened in the dark? Almost immediately, Dr. Marcus thought of a way to solve the problem.

Electron transfers can occur between atoms that do not have the same number of electrons — for example, two different ions of iron. Dr. Libby had noted that immediately after an electron transfer, the new ions are in the “wrong environment” (as opposed to the one in which they started) and electrically disturb, or polarize, other atoms in the material around them. That gives the atoms potential energy.

Dr. Marcus thought that — if the potential energy of the ions and other atoms surrounding them was considered as a whole — as the potential energy increased because of the disturbances, a critical point would be reached at which potential energy would be converted to kinetic energy, making electron transfers possible. And the process could start again, feeding the cycle.

He worked out a formula with all the elements of the reaction, and the equation showed that the energy remains the same before, after and during the transfer, so energy is conserved, following physical laws. Over the next several years, he published papers that outlined the results of experiments that might be expected if his theory was correct.

Others did that work, and most of his predictions were quickly validated. One prediction — the most unusual of all — was that, as the electron transfers occurred, they would create more perturbations, and so they would happen faster and faster until, paradoxically, there would come a point at which the reactions would slow down. When plotted, the shape of the curve of these reactions was an inverted parabola, and Dr. Marcus called the area under the curve the “inverted region.”

In the 2016 Electrochemical Society interview, Dr. Marcus said the result was “unexpected, like falling down a cliff and you make it too steep and it’s harder to fall.” Demonstrating that phenomenon proved to be difficult; it was not until 1984 that an experiment by John R. Miller, Lidia T. Calcaterra and Gerhard L. Closs confirmed it, thus validating Dr. Marcus’s entire theory.

In the years since, the theory has been extended to other, more complicated transfers — like those across membranes in photosynthesis, in organic semiconductors and in chemiluminescence (“cold light”), which is the chemical form of bioluminescence found in fireflies — and proved to be just as applicable.

In addition to the Nobel, he received the Wolf Prize, considered to be the second most prestigious award in chemistry after the Nobel, in 1985 and the National Medal of Science in 1989.

Rudolph Arthur Marcus was born in Montreal on July 21, 1923. He was the only child of Myer Marcus, who worked in a grocery store, and Esther (Cohen) Marcus.

Throughout grade and high school, he excelled in math and science. At McGill University in Montreal, he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1943 and a doctorate in 1946. Afterward, he obtained a postdoctoral position at the National Research Council of Canada and later at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working under the renowned chemist Oscar Knefler Rice.

As a postdoctoral student in Chapel Hill, Dr. Marcus began working on a theory that had been developed in the 1920s by Dr. Rice, Herman Carl Ramsperger and Louis Stevenson Kassel about reactions involving single molecules. Dr. Marcus was able to extend the RRK Theory, as it was known, to predict and interpret the rates of some types of important chemical reactions, publishing four papers on the topic in 1952. The reworked theory, which is widely used today in mass spectrometry to measure compounds and materials and in simulating combustion dynamics, is now called the RRKM Theory, honoring Dr. Marcus with an initial.

A week after he started at North Carolina, Dr. Marcus met Laura Hearne, a graduate student in sociology. They were married six months later. She died in 2003. Dr. Marcus is survived by their three sons, Alan, Kenneth and Raymond; four grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

After more than a decade teaching at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964 before joining Caltech. He continued to work until he fell ill earlier this year. His last jointly published paper appeared in the January issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry.

She was born on 18 May 1918 in Mieres, Asturias (ESP).

https://segundacentena.blogspot.com/2026/01/personas-espanolas-mayores-de-105-anos.html

Rest in peace.

She was born on 20 November 1917 in Castellanza, Varese, Lombardy Region (ITA).

She was the 6th OLP in Lombardy Region and 45th OLP in Italy.

https://www.varesenews.it/2026/07/addio-a-bruna-scandroglio-si-e-spenta-a-108-anni-la-donna-piu-longeva-della-provincia/2637574/

https://www.supercentenariditalia.it/italiani-piu-longevi-morti-recentemente

Riposi in pace Signora Scandroglio.

She was born in Ontario on 20 October 1915.

She was the Vice-Doyenne of Canada.

https://longeviquest.com/supercentenarian/margaret-taylor/

Rest in peace.

He was born on 16 July 1918.

https://www.polskieradio.pl/400/7764/Artykul/3709284,letzter-zeuge-eines-historischen-poloniakapitels-in-deutschland-alfons-tomke-wird-108

He is the Vice-Doyen of Poland.

Happy 108th Birthday!

However, there has been no official announcement from Kagoshima Prefecture regarding the oldest resident, and since the population statistics for Kagoshima City—where she resides—are compiled at the end of January, April, and September each year, it is unclear why LongeviQuest is asserting her death so definitively.

However, if she has indeed passed away, it is very sad, as she was one of my favorite "living supercentenarians."

https://longeviquest.com/supercentenarian/sato-sakashita/

Jay Keller, the Oldest Person in Vermont, USA, Dies at 110

Jay Keller, the oldest living person in the U.S. state of Vermont, passed away in Shelburne on 11 July, at the age of 110 years, 38 days.

Jay Keller was born in Albany, New York, on 3 June 1916. Jay graduated from Burlington’s Cathedral High School in 1934. He was one of only five students in his graduating class accepted into the University of Vermont College of Medicine’s two-year pre-medical program. Jay earned his M.D. degree on 10 June 1940, and married his high school sweetheart, Pauline (“Polly”) Cecelia Murphy (1916–1992), just five days later. Two weeks after their wedding, he left to begin his internship at St. Michael’s Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, marking the start of his medical career.

Having participated in the ROTC program at the University of Vermont, Jay was prepared for military service and was called to active duty immediately after completing his internship. During basic training and military maneuvers in the southern United States, he and Polly welcomed their first son, David. However, a recurrence of his severe asthma, aggravated during training, led to an honorable discharge and the family’s return to Vermont. Learning that an Essex Junction physician was missing in action in Europe, he purchased the doctor’s office with the help of a loan from his father and financing from Burlington Savings Bank. He hired newly graduated nurse Frances Reynolds, R.N., and together they established a busy practice.

In addition to their first son, David, Jay and Polly went on to have seven more children—four daughters and three sons. As his medical career progressed, he chose to specialize in surgery, requiring him to complete a surgical residency in New York City. During those demanding years, he returned to Burlington every other weekend to spend time with Polly and their growing family. After a long and distinguished career in medicine, Dr. Keller retired in 1983.

Rest in peace.