Nikolay Nikolayevich Semyonov
Categories: 1896 births | 1986 deaths | Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners | Russian chemists
Nikolay Nikolayevich Semyonov (Никола́й Никола́евич Семёнов) (April 15 (April 3, Old Style), 1896 – September 25, 1986) was a Russian/Soviet physicist and chemist.
Semyonov was born in Saratov and graduated from department of physics of Petrograd University (1913 -1917), where he was student of Abram Fedorovich Ioffe. In 1918 he moved to Samara, where he was enlisted into Kolchak's White Army during Russian Civil War.
In 1920 he returned to Petrograd and took charge of the electron phenomena laboratory of the Petrograd Physico-Technical Institute he also became vice-director of the intstitute.
In 1921 he married philologist Maria Boreishe Liverovsky (student of Zhirmunsky). In two years she died. In 1923 Nikolay married Maria's niece Natalia Nikolaevna Burtseva. She brought Nikolay son (Yuri) and daughter (Lyudmila). .During that difficult time Semenov together with Pyotr Kapitsa discovered a way to measure Magnetic field of an atomic nucleus 1922. Later the experimental setup was improved by Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach and became known as Stern-Gerlach experiment.
In 1925 he together with Yakov Frenkel studied kinetics of condensation and adsorbtion of vapors. In 1927 he studied ionisation in gases and publishes an important book Chemistry of Electron. In 1928 he together with Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock created a theory of thermal disruptive discharge of dielectrics.
He lectured at the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute and was appointed Professor in 1928. In 1931, he organized the Institute of Chemical Physics of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences (which has moved to Chernogolovka in 1943) and became his first director. In 1932 he became a full member of Soviet Academy of Science.
Semenov's outstanding work on the mechanism of chemical transformation includes an exhaustive analysis of the application of the chain theory to varied reactions (1934-1954) and, more especially, to combustion processes. He proposed a theory of degenerate branching which led to a better understanding of the phenomena associated with the induction periods of oxidation processes. Semenov has written two important books concerned with his work. Chemical Kinetics and Chain Reactions was published in 1934 with an English edition in 1935. It was the first book in the U.S.S.R. to develop a detailed theory of unbranched and branched chain reactions in chemistry. Some Problems of Chemical Kinetics and Reactivity, first published in 1954, was revised in 1958; there are also English, American, German, and Chinese editions.
In 1956 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (together with Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood) for this work. Semenov also became Hero of Socialist Labor twice, got two Stalin Prizes, five Order of Lenins and many other awards.
He died September 25, 1986 at the age of ninety.