Michael Page in 2009 at the University of Huddersfield. Photograph: Lorne Campbell/Guzelian GuyLloyd-Jones Sun 14 Feb 2021 11.52 EST Last modified on Sun 14 Feb 2021 11.54 EST My educator, mentor and friend, Michael Page, who has died aged 76, was a physical-organic chemist who made pioneering contributions to his profession over a career spanning five decades. After studying chemistry at Brighton, then a PhD in Leicester and Glasgow, Mike moved to Brandeis University, Massachusetts, in 1970 to do postdoctoral research with one of the world’s most eminent physical-organic chemists, William Jencks. Together, using classical concepts, they reinterpreted the features that can account for rate acceleration in enzymes, showing there was no need to invoke any of the previously postulated special effects. Their research article Entropic Contributions to Rate Accelerations in Enzymic and Intramolecular Reactions and the Chelate Effect, published in 1971 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, has been cited more than 1,300 times.