This is the portrait of Victor Grignard, a Nobel-Prize winning French Chemist. He is most noted for devising a new method for generating carbon-carbon bonds using magnesium to couple ketones and alkyl halides. He had a strange start in academic life for a chemist- he took a maths degree. When he eventually switched to chemistry, it was not the mathematical province of physical chemistry but to organic chemistry. While attempting to find an efficient catalyst for the process of methylation, he noted that Zn in diethyl ether had been used for this purpose and wondered whether the Mg/ether combination might be successful. Grignard reagents were first reported in 1900 and Grignard used this work for his doctoral thesis in 1901. In 1910, Grignard obtained a professorship at the University of Na