Retrospective and prospective remarks. Suggested further reading

3 Retrospective and prospective remarks. Suggested further reading 

The first important contribution to atomic stoichiometry in this century seems to be provided by Brinkley (1946). He has shown the importance of the rank of the atomic matrix and presented a proof of the phase rule of Gibbs (1876). A systematic outline of stoichiometry was presented by Petho (sometimes Petheo) and Schay (Petheo Schay, 1954 Schay, Petho, 1962). They gave a necessary and sufficient condition for the possibility of calculating an unknown reaction heat from known ones based upon the rank of the stoichiometric matrix. They introduced the notion of independence of components and of elementary reactions, the completeness of a complex chemical reaction (see the Exercises and Problems) and gave a method to generate a complete set of independent elementary reactions with as many zeros in the stoichiometric matrix as possible (see Petho, 1964). 

A starting point of atom-free stoichiometry is the paper by Horn Jackson (1972) where the notion of conservativity was defined and the paper by Vol pert (1972) that introduced subconservativity. Significant contributions were provided later by Horn and Feinberg (Horn, 1973c Feinberg Horn, 1977), and others (Deak (in Toth Erdi, 1978, pp. 253-5) Willamowski and Rossler, 1980). 

A major part of the literature that deals with stoichiometry has not been summarised and cited here but will be treated later, mainly in Chapter 4 this includes Dalton s laws of definite and multiple proportions, and the important works by Aris (1965, 1968) and Bowen (1968). There exist notions 

It may be useful to note that questions of stoichiometry do arise in connection with the stochastic model see Chapter 5. 

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