Illustrated Glossary of Organic Chemistry

Name reaction (named reaction): A chemical reaction named after the person or person who discovered and/or developed it.

The Diels-Alder reaction, a versatile [4+2] cycloaddition reaction for the synthesis of six-membered rings, is named after German chemists Otto Diels and Kurt Alder, who first reported this reaction in 1928. They shared the 1950 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in for its discovery.

Some additional name reactions include:


Things that are named after people, but are not reactions: