About: Henry A. Bent

Henry A. Bent (December 21, 1926 – January 3, 2015) was a professor of physical chemistry who studied molecular orbitals to develop atomic hybridization and valence bond theories. Bent's rule, which predicts the orbital hybridization of a central atom as a function of the electronegativities of the substituents attached to it, is named for him. In thermodynamics he developed a global approach now known as "entropy analysis" for the entropy component of thermodynamic free energy in relation to the second law of thermodynamics and the spontaneity of various chemical processes.