Kazimierz Fajans

(Kazimierz ) Fajans ( born May 27, 1887 in Warsaw, † May 18 1975 in Ann Arbor, Michigan ) was a Polish- American chemist.

Life

Fajans studied chemistry from 1904 to 1907 in Leipzig and from 1907 to 1909 in Heidelberg. In 1909 he received his doctorate at Georg Bredig on stereochemical catalysis at the University of Heidelberg. He then worked at the ETH Zurich with Richard Willstätter and at the University of Manchester with Ernest Rutherford, before he Bredig assistant at the University of Karlsruhe in 1911. Fajans in 1913 was habilitated in Karlsruhe, 1917, he was associate professor at the University of Munich, in 1925 there full professor of physical chemistry. In 1932 he became director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry. The institute was established with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Since Fajans was a Jew, he was released in 1935. He emigrated to the USA and was from 1936 to 1957 professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1942 he received the U.S. citizenship; he had received in 1918 the German citizenship.

Fajans was married and had two sons.

Fajans discovered in 1913 simultaneously with the Frederick Soddy 's displacement law. In the same year he isolated with Oswald Helmuth Göhring uranium from a 1.2 - minutes of activity ( UX2 ), which he named a new element Brevium. The current name is the isotope with mass number 234 of the element protactinium.

Works (selection, partly translated into many languages ​​)

  • The position of the radio-elements in the periodic table, 1913, in: Physical Journal 14 ( 4), 136-142
  • Radioactive transformations and the periodic system of the elements, 1913, in: Journal of the American Chemical Society 46, 422-439.
  • Radioactivity and the latest development of the theory of chemical elements, 1919 ( through several editions )
  • Physico- chemistry lab, 1929 (jointly with J. Wüst )
  • Artificial radioactive isotopes of thallium, lead and bismuth, 1941
  • Electronic structure of molecules, 1948
  • Quanticule theory of chemical bonding, 1960
  • Memoirs, 1975
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