The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1976 was awarded to William Lipscomb "for his studies on the structure of boranes illuminating problems of chemical bonding".
 

"Boranes" is the now accepted name for boron hydrides, i.e. the compounds of the element boron with hydrogen. There are a great number of boranes but very little was known about them for a long time. As a rule they must be studied at a very low temperature, they are usually unstable and chemically aggressive, explosive and toxic. Lipscomb has tackled the problems with skillfull topological methods enabling him to identify the possible combinations of feasible types of bonding. Lipscomb has tackled the problems on a broad front, working in a little known field that is difficult to penetrate, and he has been the leading figure in the advances made there.