Arthur Michael

Michael Arthur ( born August 7, 1853 in Buffalo, New York, † February 8, 1942 in Orlando, Florida) was an American chemist who is known for the Michael addition.

Life

Arthur Michael was born in Buffalo, New York. Due to an illness, it was not possible for him to attend Harvard University and he learned chemistry by local teachers, and in his private laboratory. He traveled at the age of 18 years with his parents and Europe learned on this trip know several famous chemist, where he also studied; inter alia, August Wilhelm von Hofmann, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, Charles Adolphe Wurtz and Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev. In 1880 he returned to the U.S. and worked at Tufts College as a professor of chemistry. There he met Helen Cecilia De Silver Abbott and married her. Together they went after he failed to England and worked on the Isle of Wight in a private laboratory in 1891 at the head of the chemistry faculty of Clark University in Worcester (Massachusetts ). After a few years they returned to the Tufts College, where Michael was retired in 1907. He founded after a new private lab in Newton Center in Boston. In 1912 he moved to Harvard University, where he worked until 1936 as a professor lecture without obligations. It is worth noting that Michael never earned a university degree.

Work

Michael is now mainly known for the eponymous Michael addition, but he also led thermodynamic concepts, especially that of the entropy in the organic chemistry.