Named Reactions

Definition: A Chemical transformation of one (or more) compounds into one (or more) different compounds that represents a reaction that can be distilled from at least one, but in general more than one elementary steps.

A chemical reaction is a network of transformations from reactants to products. These steps can be grouped into clusters corresponding to the mechanism for a particular "named reaction". This simplifies the discussion of any chemical reaction because because it can simply be said what the overall important sequences are, rather than all the small details that might have happened from point A to point B. A named reaction often bears the name of a famous chemist who discovered it.