Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson (14 July 1921–26 September 1996) was a Nobel laureate English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis.

In 1939 he obtained a Royal Scholarship for study at the Imperial College London where he graduated in 1941.
In 1942, Professor Friedriech A. Paneth was recruiting young chemists for the nuclear energy project.
At Harvard, he still did some nuclear work on excitation functions for protons on cobalt but had already begun to work on olefin complexes.
In June 1955, he was appointed to the chair of Inorganic Chemistry at Imperial College in the University of London, and from then on worked, almost entirely on the complexes of transition metals.
He received many awards, including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 for his work on sandwich compounds (with Ernst Otto Fischer).
He was married, with two daughters. Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson died on 26 September, 1996.