Textbook Problem

Until the discoveries of Alfred Werner, it was thought that carbon had to be present in a compound for it to be optically active. Werner prepared the following compound containing OH⁻ ions as bridging groups and separated the optical isomers.

a. Draw structures of the two optically active isomers of this compound.

b. What are the oxidation states of the cobalt ions?

c. How many unpaired electrons are present if the complex is the low-spin case?