Prerequisites
What You Need Before Starting
This course is pitched at advanced undergraduate level and derives both of its main results rather than quoting them. That makes the prerequisites unusually specific: you do not need a year of organic chemistry, you need four particular ideas.
Everything below is already on this site, so nothing is repeated here. Each entry says what the course actually uses, so you can tell in a sentence whether you need it.
Stereochemistry
Part 1 assumes you can look at a molecule and say whether it is chiral, and that (R) and (S) mean something to you. If the primer was enough, skip this.
- Stereochemistry — stereocentres, the R/S convention, racemates and diastereomers
- Conformational analysis — useful but optional: why shape and energy are linked
Metal–ligand complexes
Kagan’s whole result follows from a metal carrying two chiral ligands rather than one. If you have never counted the ways two ligands can sit on a metal, Part 2 will feel like sleight of hand.
- Organometallic chemistry — metal centres, ligands, coordination number — the ML₂ species is exactly this
Reaction rates and catalysis
Both derivations compare how fast competing species react. You need to be comfortable writing a rate law and saying what a catalyst does and does not change.
- Reaction rates — rate laws, orders, the rate-determining step
- Transition state theory — why a catalyst changes the barrier and not the equilibrium
- Enzyme kinetics — catalysis with saturable binding — the closest familiar analogue to autocatalysis
Differential equations
Part 3 is a dynamical-systems argument wearing a chemistry hat. You need to separate a first-order equation, find its fixed points, and decide whether each is stable.
- ODEs and Green’s functions — first-order equations and how to solve them; the Green’s function half is not needed here
- Differential Equations — separation of variables, equilibria and stability — the mathematics Part 3 is really made of
Why any of this matters to biology
Not needed to follow the derivations, but it is the reason the prize is interesting rather than merely clever.
- Amino acids — that every one of them in you is left-handed, and nothing in chemistry required that
- Carbohydrates — the matching fact for sugars, which are right-handed
If you are coming from physics
You may need less than you think. Part 3 is a bifurcation problem: a control parameter, a symmetric state that loses stability, and two equivalent broken states. If that sentence is familiar, the chemistry is a short vocabulary lesson and the mathematics is already yours.
The closest thing on this site is the treatment of instabilities in thermohaline circulation, which is the same mathematics applied to an ocean rather than a flask.