7,500 forint – György Oláh

The Magyar Nemzeti Bank is issuing a silver collector coin with a face value of 7,500 forints and its non-ferrous metal version of 3,000 forints named ‘Oláh György’ (‘George Andrew Olah’) on 10 December 2024 to mark the 30th anniversary of receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994 for the ‘results he achieved in the study of positively charged hydrocarbons’. The oval collector coins are the 10th addition to a thematic series of coins depicting Nobel Prize winners of Hungarian origin and the work for which they received the award. The coins were designed by sculptor Mihály Fritz. George A. Olah won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994 for his achievements in the study of positively charged hydrocarbons and his contributions to the area of carbocation chemistry. The significance of George Olah’s discovery is that he was able to prove the previously only suspected existence of carbocations during experiments and he was able to examine their properties. His achievements in the field of carbocations and other electron-deficient particles provided a theoretical basis of new, more up-to-date hydrocarbon chemical processes. His research into cations with special structures yielded several practical benefits. As a result of his discovery, new types of unleaded gasoline were developed, with a higher octane number than that which existed previously; the methanol economy he developed is a viable alternative to the greening of the energy and transport sectors as well as the chemical industry.