Vladimir Vasilyevich Markovnikov

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Vladimir Vasilyevich Markovnikov (December 22, 1838 – February 11, 1904), was a Russian chemist.

Markovnikov is best known for Markovnikov's rule, elucidated in 1869 to describe addition reactions of H-X to alkenes. According to this rule, the nucleophilic X- adds to the carbon atom with fewer hydrogen atoms, while the proton adds to the carbon atom with more hydrogen atoms bonded to it. Thus, hydrogen chloride (HCl) adds to propene, CH₃-CH=CH₂ to produce 2-chloropropane CH₃CHClCH₃ rather than the isomeric 1-chloropropane CH₃CH₂CH₂Cl. The rule is useful in predicting the molecular structures of products of addition reactions. Why hydrogen bromide exhibited both Markovnikov as well as reversed-order, or anti-Markovnikov, addition, however, was not understood until Morris S. Kharasch offered an explanation in 1933.

Hughes has discussed the reasons for Markovnikov's lack of recognition during his lifetime. Although he published mostly in Russian which was not understood by most Western European chemists, the 1870 article in which he first stated his rule was written in German. However, the rule was included in a 4-page addendum to a 26-page article on isomeric butyric acids, and based on very slight experimental evidence even by the standards of the time. Hughes concludes that the rule was an inspired guess, unjustified by the evidence of the time, but which turned out later to be correct (in most cases).

Markovnikov also contributed to organic chemistry by finding carbon rings with more than six carbon atoms, a ring with four carbon atoms in 1879, and a ring with seven in 1889.

Markovnikov also showed that butyric and isobutyric acids have the same chemical formula (C₄H₈O₂) but different structures; i.e., they are isomers.

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Ilya Romanovich Prigogine

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Ilya Romanovich Prigogine (25 January 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.

Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the Russian Revolution of 1917. His father, Roman Prigogine, was a chemical engineer at the Imperial Moscow Technical School; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist. Because the family was critical of the new Soviet system, they left Russia in 1921. They first went to Germany and in 1929, to Belgium, where Prigogine received Belgian nationality in 1949.

Prigogine studied chemistry at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where in 1950, he became professor. In 1959, he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels, Belgium. In that year, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he later was appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, now the Center for Complex Quantum Systems. In that year, he also returned to Belgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.

He was a member of numerous scientific organizations, and received numerous awards, prizes and 53 honorary degrees. In 1955, Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences. For his study in irreversible thermodynamics, he received the Rumford Medal in 1976, and in 1977, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Until his death, he was president of the International Academy of Science, Munich and was in 1997, one of the founders of the International Commission on Distance Education (CODE), a worldwide accreditation agency. In 1998 he was awarded an honoris causa doctorate by the UNAM in Mexico City.

Prigogine received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1985. Prigogine is best known for his definition of dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. In summary, Ilya Prigogine discovered that importation and dissipation of energy into chemical systems could reverse the maximization of entropy rule imposed by the second law of thermodynamics.

Dissipative structure theory led to pioneering research in self-organizing systems, as well as philosophical inquiries into the formation of complexity on biological entities and the quest for a creative and irreversible role of time in the natural sciences. With Professor Robert Herman, he also developed the basis of the two fluid model, a traffic model in traffic engineering for urban networks, analogous to the two fluid model in classical statistical mechanics.

Prigogine's formal concept of self-organization was used also as a "complementary bridge" between General Systems Theory and thermodynamics, conciliating the cloudiness of some important systems theory concepts with scientific rigour.

In his later years, his work concentrated on the fundamental role of indeterminism in nonlinear systems on both the classical and quantum level. Prigogine and coworkers proposed a Liouville space extension of quantum mechanics. A Liouville space is the vector space formed by the set of (self-adjoint) linear operators, equipped with an inner product, that act on a Hilbert space. There exists a mapping of each linear operator into Liouville space, yet not every self-adjoint operator of Liouville space has a counterpart in Hilbert space, and in this sense Liouville space has a richer structure than Hilbert space. The Liouville space extension proposal by Prigogine and co-workers aimed to solve the arrow of time problem of thermodynamics and the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.

Prigogine co-authored several books with Isabelle Stengers, including The End of Certainty and La Nouvelle Alliance (Order out of Chaos).

In his 1996 book, La Fin des certitudes, co-authored by Isabelle Stengers and published in English in 1997 as The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief: "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach of Newton, Einstein and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability.

Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles. This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or as undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability.

Prigogine asserts that Newtonian physics has now been "extended" three times: first with the use of the wave function in quantum mechanics, then with the introduction of spacetime in general relativity and finally with the recognition of indeterminism in the study of unstable systems.

 

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Zhores Ivanovich Alferov

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Zhores Ivanovich Alferov; born 15 March 1930 is a Soviet and Russian physicist and academic who contributed significantly to the creation of modern heterostructure physics and electronics. He is the inventor of the heterotransistor and the winner of 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Alferov was born in Vitebsk, Byelorussian SSR, Soviet Union, to a Belarusian father, Ivan Karpovich Alferov, a factory manager, and Anna Vladimirovna Rosenblum. Zhores was named after French socialist Jean Jaurès while his older brother was named Marx after Karl Marx. In 1947 he completed high school 42 in Minsk and started Belarusian Polytechnic Academy. In 1952, he graduated from V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad. Since 1953 he has worked in the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From the Institute, he earned several scientific degrees: a Candidate of Sciences in Technology in 1961 and a Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics in 1970. He has been director of the Institute since 1987. He was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1972, and a full member in 1979. From 1989, he has been Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences and President of its Saint Petersburg Scientific Center. In 2000 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Herbert Kroemer, "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and optoelectronics".

Alferov invented the heterotransistor. This coped with much higher frequencies than its predecessors, and apparently revolutionised the mobile phone and satellite communications. Alferov and Kroemer independently applied this technology to firing laser lights. This, in turn, revolutionised semiconductor design in a host of areas, including LEDs, barcodes readers and CDs.

Hermann Grimmeiss, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards Nobel prizes, said: "Without Alferov, it would not be possible to transfer all the information from satellites down to the Earth or to have so many telephone lines between cities."

Since 1962, he has been working in the area of semiconductor heterostructures. His contributions to physics and technology of semiconductor heterostructures, especially investigations of injection properties, development of lasers, solar cells, LED's, and epitaxy processes have led to the creation of modern heterostructure physics and electronics.

He has an almost messianic conception of heterostructures, writing: "Many scientists have contributed to this remarkable progress, which not only determines in large measure the future prospects of solid state physics but in a certain sense affects the future of human society as well."

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Andre Konstantin Geim

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Andre Konstantin Geim, (born 21 October 1958) is a Soviet-born Dutch-British physicist working in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.

Geim was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Konstantin Novoselov for his work on graphene. He is Regius Professor of Physics and Royal Society Research Professor at the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology.

Andre Geim was born to Konstantin Alekseyevich Geim and Nina Nikolayevna Bayer in Sochi on 21 October 1958. Both his parents were engineers of German origin. In 1965, the family moved to Nalchik, where he studied at a high school. After graduation, he applied to the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He took the entrance exams twice, but attributes his failure to qualify to discrimination on account of his German ethnicity. He then applied to the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), where he was accepted. He said that at the time he would not have chosen to study solid-state physics, preferring particle physics or astrophysics, but is now happy with his choice. He received a diplom (MSc degree equivalent) from MIPT in 1982 and a Candidate of Sciences (PhD equivalent) degree in metal physics in 1987 from the Institute of Solid State Physics (ISSP) at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) in Chernogolovka.

After earning his PhD with Victor Petrashov, Geim worked as a research scientist at the Institute for Microelectronics Technology (IMT) at RAS, and from 1990 as a post-doctoral fellow at the universities of Nottingham (twice), Bath, and Copenhagen. He said that while at Nottingham he could spend his time on research rather than "swimming through Soviet treacle," and determined to leave the Soviet Union.

He obtained his first tenured position in 1994, when he was appointed associate professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, where he did work on mesoscopic superconductivity. He later gained Dutch citizenship. One of his doctoral students at Nijmegen was Konstantin Novoselov, who went on to become his main research partner. However, Geim has said that he had an unpleasant time during his academic career in the Netherlands. He was offered professorships at Nijmegen and Eindhoven, but turned them down as he found the Dutch academic system too hierarchical and full of petty politicking. "This can be pretty unpleasant at times," he says. "It's not like the British system where every staff member is an equal quantity." On the other hand, Geim writes in his Nobel lecture that "In addition, the situation was a bit surreal because outside the university walls I received a warm-hearted welcome from everyone around, including Jan Kees and other academics." (Prof. Jan Kees Maan was the research boss of Geim during his time at Radboud University Nijmegen.)

In 2001 he became a professor of physics at the University of Manchester, and was appointed director of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology in 2002. Geim's wife and long-standing co-author, Irina Grigorieva, also moved to Manchester as a lecturer in 2001. The same year, they were joined by Novoselov who moved to Manchester from Nijmegen, which awarded him a PhD in 2004. Geim served as Langworthy Professor between 2007 and 2013, leaving this endowed professorship to Dr Novoselov in 2012. Also, between 2007 and 2010 Geim was an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow before becoming one of Royal Society Research Professors. In 2010 Radboud University Nijmegen appointed him professor of innovative materials and nanoscience, extending Geim's long list of honorary professorships.

Geim's achievements include the discovery of a simple method for isolating single atomic layers of graphite, known as graphene, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Manchester and IMT. The team published their findings in October 2004 in Science.

Graphene consists of one-atom-thick layers of carbon atoms arranged in two-dimensional hexagons, and is the thinnest material in the world, as well as one of the strongest and hardest. The material has many potential applications.

Geim said one of the first applications of graphene could be in the development of flexible touchscreens, and that he has not patented the material because he would need a specific application and an industrial partner. On 5 October 2010, Geim was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene". Upon hearing of the award he said, "I'm fine, I slept well. I didn't expect the Nobel Prize this year» and that his plans for the day would not change. The lecture for the award took place on 8 December 2010 at Stockholm University. He said he hopes that graphene and other two-dimensional crystals will change everyday life as plastics did for humanity. A colleague of Geim said that his award shows that people can still win a Nobel by "mucking about in a lab".

Geim was involved in the development of a biomimetic adhesive which became known as gecko tape — so called because of the adhesiveness of gecko feet — research of which is still in the early stages. It is hoped that the development will eventually allow humans to scale ceilings, like Spider-Man.

Geim's research in 1997 into the possible effects of magnetism on water scaling led to the famous discovery of direct diamagnetic levitation of water, and led to a frog being levitated. For this experiment, he and Michael Berry received the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize. "We were asked first whether we dared to accept this prize, and I take pride in our sense of humor and self-deprecation that we did".

Geim has also carried out research on mesoscopic physics and superconductivity. He said of the range of subjects he has studied: "Many people choose a subject for their PhD and then continue the same subject until they retire. I despise this approach. I have changed my subject five times before I got my first tenured position and that helped me to learn different subjects."

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Sergei Vasiljevich Lebedev

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Sergei Vasiljevich Lebedev (July 25, 1874 – May 1, 1934) was a Russian/Soviet chemist and the inventor of polybutadiene synthetic rubber, the first commercially viable and mass-produced type of synthetic rubber.

Lebedev was born in 1874 in Lublin and went to school in Warsaw. In 1900, he graduated from St. Petersburg University and found work at the Petersburg Margarine Factory.

Starting in 1902, Lebedev moved from university to university in Russia, starting at the Saint-Petersburg Institute for Railroad Engineering. In 1904, he returned to St. Petersburg University to work under Alexei Yevgrafovich Favorskii (Stalin Prize, 1941, for contributions to the manufacture of synthetic rubber).

In 1915, Lebedev was appointed Professor at the Women's Pedagogical Institute in St. Petersburg. After 1916, he was a Professor of the Saint Petersburg Academy for Military Medicine. In 1925, he became the leader of the Oil Laboratory (after 1928, the Laboratory of Synthetic Resins) at St. Petersburg University. He died in Leningrad and is interred in Tikhvin Cemetery.

Lebedev's main works are devoted to polymerisation of diene hydrocarbons. He was the first to research the polymerisation of butadiene (1910-1913). In 1910, Lebedev was the first to get synthetic rubber based on poly-butadiene. His book Research in polymerisation of by-ethylene hydrocarbons (1913) became the bible for studies of synthetic rubber.

After 1914, he studied polymerisation of ethylene monomers, leading to modern industrial methods for manufacturing of butil synthetic rubber and poly-isobutylene. Between 1926 and 1928, Lebedev developed a single-stage method for manufacturing butadiene out of ethanol.

In 1928, he developed an industrial method for producing synthetic rubber based on polymerisation of butadiene using metallic sodium as a catalyst. This method became the base for the Soviet industry of synthetic rubber. The Soviets lacked reliable access to natural rubber, making the manufacture of synthetic rubber important. The first three synthetic rubber plants were launched in 1932-33. For butadiene production they used grain or potato ethanol as a feedstock. It caused a number of jokes about "Russian method of making tires from potatoes".

By 1940, the Soviet Union had the largest synthetic rubber industry in the world, producing more than 50,000 tons per year. During World War II, Lebedev's process of obtaining butadiene from ethyl alcohol was also used by the German rubber industry. Another important contribution of Lebedev's was the study of the kinetics of hydrogenation of ethylene hydrocarbons and the development of a number of synthetic motor oils for aircraftengines.

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Vasily Vladimirovich Petrov

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Vasily Vladimirovich Petrov (19 July 1761 – 15 August 1834) was a Russian experimental physicist, self-taught electrical technician, academician of Russian Academy of Sciences (since 1809; Corresponding member since 1802).

Vasily Petrov was born in the town of Oboyan (currently Kursk Oblast of Russia) in the family of a priest. He studied at a public school in Kharkov, and then at the St. Petersburg Teacher's College.

In 1788, he gained a position as mathematics and physics teacher at Kolyvansko-Voskresenskoe College of Mining, in the town of Barnaul. In 1791, he was transferred to Saint Petersburg to teach mathematics and Russian at the military Engineering College, in the Izmailovsky regiment. In 1793, Petrov was invited to teach mathematics and physics at the St. Petersburg Medical and Surgery School, at the military hospital. In 1795, he was promoted to the rank of 'Extraordinary Professor'. During the next few years, he built up a comprehensive physics laboratory.

His first published book, "A collection of new physical-chemical experiments and observations", was published in 1801. The bulk of this work was dedicated to the description of experiments related to combustion, as evidence against the then-popular phlogiston theory.

The chapters, describing luminosity of phosphors of mineral and organic origins have elicited vivid interest in scientific circles. Petrov was able to detect the maximum temperature when phosphorus ceases to glow in open (atmospheric) air, by his numerous experiments with fluorite he was able to prove it glows due to a different reason than phosphorus.

In 1802, Petrov discovered the electric arc effect, thanks to his building the world's largest and most powerful Voltaic pile at the time, which consisted of around 4,200 copper and zinc discs. In “News of Galvanic-Voltaic Experiments,” 1803, Petrov described experiments performed using the voltaic pile, detailing the stable arc discharge and the indication of its possible use in artificial lighting, melting metals for smelting and welding, obtaining pure metallic oxides, and reduction of metals from oxides mixed with powdered carbon and oils.

Petrov was forgotten soon after his death and his works fell into oblivion. A copy of "News of Galvanic-Voltaic Experiments" was discovered by chance in a library in the town of Vilno near the end of the 19th century. The book was the first time in world literature that a series of important physical phenomena related to electricity were described in detail. It was not until the late 1880s that technology based on Petrov's experiments was developed with the goal of industrial usage.

 

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Paul Walden

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Paul Walden (26 July 1863 – 22 January 1957) was a Russian and Latvian-German chemist known for his work in stereochemistry and history of chemistry. In particular he invented the stereochemical reaction known as Walden inversion and synthesized the first room-temperature ionic liquid, ethylammonium nitrate.

Walden was born in Rozula, Latvia in a large peasant family. At the age of four, he lost his father and later his mother. Thanks to financial support from his two older brothers who lived in Riga (one was a merchant and another served as a lieutenant) Walden managed to complete his education – first graduated with honors from the district school in the town of Cēsis (1876), and then from the Riga Technical High School (1882). In December 1882, he enrolled into the Riga Technical University and became seriously interested in chemistry. In 1886, he published his first scientific study on the color evaluation of the reactions of nitric and nitrous acid with various reagents and establishing the limits of sensitivity of the color method to detection of nitric acid. In April 1887, he was appointed a member of the Russian Physics and Chemical Society. During this time, Walden started his collaboration with Wilhelm Ostwald (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1909) that has greatly influenced his development as a scientist. Their first work together was published in 1887 and was devoted to the dependence of the electrical conductivity of aqueous solutions of salts on their molecular weight.

In 1888, Walden graduated from the University with a degree in chemical engineering and continued working at the Chemistry Department as an assistant to professor C. Bischof. Under his guidance, Walden began compiling "Handbook of Stereochemistry" which was published in 1894. In preparation of this handbook, Walden had to perform numerous chemical syntheses and characterizations which resulted in 57 journal papers on stereochemistry alone, published between 1889 and 1900 in Russian and foreign journals 57 articles on the stereochemistry. He also continued his research in the field of physical chemistry, establishing in 1889 that the ionizing power of non-aqueous solvent is directly proportional to the dielectric constant. During the summer vacations of 1890 and 1891, Walden was visiting Ostwald at the University of Leipzig and in September 1891 defended there a master thesis on the affinity values of certain organic acids. Ostwald suggested him to stay in Leipzig as a private lecturer, but Walden declined, hoping for a better career in Riga.

In the summer of 1892 he was appointed assistant professor of physical chemistry. A year later he defended his doctorate on osmotic phenomena in sedimentary layers and in September 1894 became professor of analytical and physical chemistry at the Riga Technical University. He worked there until 1911 and during 1902–1905 was rector of the University. In 1895, Walden made his most remarkable discovery which was later named Walden inversion, namely that various stereoisomers can be obtained from the same compound via certain exchange reactions involving hydrogen. This topic became the basis for his habilitation thesis defended in March 1899 at St. Petersburg University.

After that, Walden became interested in electrochemistry of nonaqueous solutions. In 1902, he proposed a theory of autodissociation of inorganic and organic solvents. In 1905, he found a relationship between the maximum molecular conductivity and viscosity of the medium and in 1906, coined the term "solvation". Together with his work on stereochemistry, these results brought him to prominence; in particular, he was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1913 and 1914.

Walden was also credited as a talented chemistry lecturer. In his memoirs, he wrote: "My audience usually was crowded and the feedback of sympathetic listeners gave me strength... my lectures I was giving spontaneously, to bring freshness to the subject... I never considered teaching as a burden".

1896 brought reforms to the Riga Technical University. Whereas previously, all teaching was conducted in German and Walden was the only professor giving some courses in Russian, from then on, Russian became the official language. This change allowed receiving subsidies from the Russian government and helped the alumni in obtaining positions in Russia. These reforms resulted in another and rather unusual collaboration of Walden with Ostwald: Walden was rebuilding the Chemistry Department and Ostwald has sent the blueprints of the chemical laboratories in Leipzig as an example. In May 1910, Walden was elected a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and in 1911 was invited to Saint Petersburg to lead the Chemical Laboratories of the Academy founded in 1748, by Mikhail Lomonosov. He remained in that position till 1919. As an exception, he was allowed to stay in Riga where he had better research possibilities, but he was traveling, almost every week, by train, to St. Petersburg for the Academy meetings and guidance of research. In the period 1911–1915, Walden published 14 articles in the "Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences" on electrochemistry of nonaqueous solutions. In particular, in 1914 he synthesized the first room-temperature ionic liquid, namely ethylammonium nitrate (C2H5)NH+3·NO−3 with the melting point of 12 °C.

After 1915, due to the difficulties caused by the World War I, political unrest in Russia and then October Revolution, Walden had reduced his research activity and focused on teaching and administrative work, taking numerous leading positions in science. Due to the political unrest in Latvia, Walden had immigrated to Germany. He was appointed as professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Rostock where he worked until retirement in 1934. In 1924 he was invited back to Riga, where he gave a series of lectures. He was offered leading positions in chemistry in Riga and in St. Petersburg, but declined. Despite his emigration, Walden retained his popularity in Russia, and in 1927 he was appointed as a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Later, he also became a member of the Swedish (1928) and Finnish (1932) Academies.

In his late years, Walden focused on history of chemistry and collected a unique library of over 10,000 volumes. The library and his house were destroyed during the British bombing of Rostock in 1942. Walden moved to Berlin and then to Frankfurt where he became a visiting professor of the history of chemistry at the local university. He met the end of World War II in the French Occupation Zone, cut off the Rostock University, which was located in the Soviet Zone, and thus left without any source of income. He survived on a modest pension arranged by German chemists, giving occasional lectures in Tübingen and writing memoirs. In 1949, he published his most well known book on "History of Chemistry". He died in Gammertingen in 1957 at the age of 93. His memoirs were published only in 1974.