Meredith Gwynne Evans

In 1933, M. G. Evans was awarded a Rockefeller Scholarship and went to Princeton University to work with Hugh Taylor and Henry Eyring, amongst others. Back in Manchester, Evans became one of Michael Polanyi's principal coworkers on the development of the transition state theory. In 1935, with only one month difference, both Henry Eyring in Princeton, and Michael Polanyi and Meredith Gwynne Evans in Manchester published the founding papers on transition state theory, formulating what is now known as the "Eyring equation" which opened up a new era in the study of chemical kinetics.

Evans was appointed Assistant Lecturer at the University of Manchester from 1929 until 1939, when he became Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Leeds. One of Evan's students was George Porter, who later noted (in a conversation with Sir John Meurig Thomas) that Evans was the most brilliant chemist he had ever met. (George Porter went on to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1967.) Evans returned to the University of Manchester in 1949. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947.

Meredith Gwynne Evans, FRS (2 December 1904 – 25 December 1952) was a British physical chemist, who made important theoretical contributions in the study of chemical reaction rates and reaction mechanisms. Together with Henry Eyring and Michael Polanyi, Meredith Gwynne Evans is one of the founders of the transition state theory.

Meredith Gwynne Evans was born in Atherton, a suburb of Manchester, on 2 December 1904 and the son of Frederick George Evans, an elementary schoolmaster from Pembrokeshire, Wales, and his wife, Margaretta Eleanora Williams. He was the eldest son in a family of three sons and one daughter.