Original: He won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1998 along with Gabor A. Somorjai of the University of California , Berkeley for '' their outstanding contributions to the field of the surface science in general and for their elucidation of fundamental mechanisms of heterogeneous catalytic reactions at single crystal surface in particular . ''
Simplified: Professor Ertl and Gabor A. Somorjai won the Wolf Prize for Chemistry in 1998 for outstanding results in surface science and for discovering how crystals react to experiments .