Sorbonne

Alkylation of benzene with alkyl halides m the presence of aluminum chloride was discovered by Charles Friedel and James M Crafts m 1877 Crafts who later became president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology collaborated with Friedel at the Sorbonne m Pans and together they developed what we now call the Friedel-Crafts reaction into one of the most useful synthetic methods m organic chemistry... 

Carnot soon realized that he did not have the temperament of a soldier and in 1818 left the army. After leaving the army Carnot took up residence in his father s former Paris apartment, and was presumably supported by his family whiile he attended classes at Sorbonne, the College de France, and the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. He also frequently visited factories and workshops, both to see steam engines actually in use, and to learn more about the economics of such industrial use of energy. There were rumors that he did at least on a lew occasions receive some consultant s fees for his advise, but there was no clear documentary evidence of this. In 1827 he returned to active militaiy seiwice with the rank of captain, but this lasted only a little more than a year. He resigned in 1828 and died of cholera four years later in Paris. 

In 1906 Pierre was awarded a full professorship and position as chair of physics at the Sorbonne and Marie was promised a position as director of the laboratory which the university planned to create for Pierre. However, in April 1906 Pierre was killed when he stepped into the path of a horse-drawn cart. While this event personally devastated Marie, it was a pivotal point in her professional career. She was offered Pierre s chaired position at the level of assistant professor, making her the first woman in France to obtain a professorship and allowing her to both continue her research and financially support her family. 

Joseph Achille Le Bel (IB47-1930I was born in Pechelbronn, France, and studied at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Sorbonne in Paris. Freed by his family s wealth from the need to earn a living, he established his own private laboratory. 

Charles Friedel (1832-1899) was horn in Strasbourg, France, and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. Trained as both 3 mineralogist and a chemist, he was among the first to attempt to manufacture synthetic diamonds. He was professor of mineralogy at the School of Mines before becoming professor of chemistry at the Sorbonne (1884-1899). 

Scientists in the 1920s, speculating on this problem, became convinced that an entirely new approach was required to treat electrons in atoms and molecules. In 1924 a young French scientist, Louis de Broglie (1892-1987), in his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne made a revolutionary suggestion. He reasoned that if light could show the behavior of particles (photons) as well as waves, then perhaps an electron, which Bohr had treated as a particle, could behave like a wave. In a few years, de Broglie s postulate was confirmed experimentally. This led to the development of a whole new discipline, first called wave mechanics, more commonly known today as quantum mechanics. 

Marie and Irene Curie, and their husbands, Pierre Curie and Frederic Joliot. Marie Curie (1867-1934) was born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, then a part of the Russian empire. In 1891 she emigrated to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where she met and married a French physicist, Pierre Curie (1859-1906). The Curies were associates of Henri Becquerel, the man who discovered that uranium salts are radioactive. They showed that thorium, like uranium, is radioactive and that the amount of radiation emitted is directly proportional to the amount of uranium or thorium in the sample. 

In 1903, the Curies received the Nobel Prize in physics (with Becquerel) for the discovery of radioactivity. Three years later, Pierre Curie died at the age of 46, the victim of a tragic accident. Fie stepped from behind a carriage in a busy Paris street and was run down by a horse-driven truck. That same year, Marie became the first woman instructor at the Sorbonne. In 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium, thereby becoming the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. 

Dr. Basil T. Fedoroff, scientist and engineer, who worked at Picatinny Arsenal from 1946—1961 and served as an Arsenal consultant from 1961—1975, died in Miami, Florida on 29 December 1976 at the age of 85. Dr. Fedoroff, who was best known as the Chief Editor of the Encyclopedia of Explosives and Related Items , Volumes 1 to 7 (1960—1975), was bom in Merv, Russia on 8 January 1891. He graduated from the Imperial Tomsk Institute of Technology as a chemical engineer in 1914, and earned his doctorate in the same field from the University of Paris, Sorbonne in 1940... 

After graduating from Tomsk, he served in the Imperial Russian Navy and the French Foreign Legion. He came to the United States by way of Canada in the early 1920 s and obtained his citizenship in 1927. He enrolled at Sorbonne in 1931 and returned to this country after obtaining his doctorate... 

We are particularly pleased to welcome the article by Okada on dynamic processes in molten salts because it represents the culmination of the efforts of Professor Chemla at the Sorbonne to arrange such an article. 

In his Confessions d un chimiste ordinaire (1981), Jacques mused that this state of affairs exists partly because chemists rarely write about their discipline for the general public like their biologist and physicist colleagues. And chemists have contributed to the view of their metier as a descriptive, empirical science. Recalling a late-nineteenth-century course he attended at the Sorbonne, Lespieau remarked in 1913, "Four and a half hours was all the time devoted to generalities if one had doubled this time, it would not have been detrimental to the seventeenth property of chlorous anhydride. "5... 

Dumas was more explicit about principles and causes in his lectures on chemical philosophy to students at the Sorbonne in 1837 ... 

In 1893, Charles Friedel sought to persuade his Sorbonne colleagues of the need to teach physical chemistry, saying that there are new theories and new needs in the teaching of chemistry each day "this is especially true for phenomena on the boundaries of chemistry and physics, and where considerations of the chemical molecule intervene, which appears to be, in a lot of cases at least, identifical with the physical molecule [my emphasis], "Rapport par Charles Friedel," 109110, in Pieces-annexes Proces-Verbaux de la Faculte des Sciences de Paris, dated June 1893. 

Van t Hoff here referred to a lecture in which the twenty-six-year-old Lespieau had introduced the new physical chemistry of van t Hoff, Ostwald, and Arrhenius to colleagues in Friedel s Sorbonne laboratory. Among other things, Lespieau dealt in his paper with a problem posed by van t Hoff having to do with the validity of neglecting the difference in specific heats of water and ice, and Lespieau demonstrated that the term where this difference figures can be finally eliminated. 13 Who was Robert Lespieau ... 

This was the period during which Deville, Berthelot, Moissan, and other leading French chemists had persisted in the use of an outmoded chemical notation abandoned elsewhere. 16 By 1870 or so, the equivalent notation had disappeared in chemical journals outside France. French atomists sometimes used the tactics of the Sorbonne organic chemist Friedel, who wrote acetylene dichloride as C2H2C12 for the Berichte of the Berlin Chemical Society but C4H2C12 for the Comptes rendus of the Paris Academy of Sciences. 17... 

From 1892 until 1904, when he became a lecturer at the Sorbonne, Lespieau taught chemistry at the College Chaptal and at the Ecole Primaire Superieure Lavoisier. When he completed his dissertation in late 1896, his defense at-... 

Friedel became internationally known for the synthetic method called the Friedel-Crafts Reaction using aluminum chloride as a catalyst in the the introduction of an alkyl or acyl group into benzene. James Mason Crafts was an American professor from MIT working with Friedel in 1877 at the Sorbonne. Crafts later became president of MIT. 

Lespieau s may have been the first professorship of "theoretical chemistry" anywhere. There was not a chair of theoretical chemistry in England, for example, until 1931.40 That Lespieau wanted to have this title demonstrates his self-consciousness about the need for chemical "theories," not just chemical empiricism, to renew French chemistry. He had the sense that he was putting organic chemistry at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale on a new and different track. 

See Kirrman s remarks, in Hommage a Albert Kirrman. And especially on Job, Albert Kirrmann, Notice sur les titres et travaux scientifiques(on 8), typescript of 20 pages, ENS, courtesy of ENS Bibliotheque des Lettres. Eugene Bloch taught physics at the Ecole Normale from 1913 on, and he became professor of theoretical physics and celestial mechanics at the Sorbonne in 1930. He succeeded Henri Abraham, one of Lespieau s old friends. 

S. Bourguel becameprofesseur sans chaire at the Sorbonne in 1932, shortly before his untimely death the following year. See Robert Lespieau, "Notice sur les travaux de Maurice Bourguel," Bull.SCF Memoires 53 (1933) 11451153. 

See C. K. Ingold, I. Dostrovsky, and E. D. Hughes, "Mechanisms of Substitution," JCS 149 (1946) 173194 and esp. Ingold, "Les reactions de la chimie organique (quatre conferences), Actualites Scientifiques et Industrielles, no. 1037 (Paris Hermann, 1948), 3238. These lectures were given at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris in May 1946 on the invitation of Edmond Bauer, Jean Perrin s successor at the Sorbonne and the Laboratoire de Chimie Physique. 

The 155-page typescript was deposited at the Bibliotheque Nationale. Edmond Bauer, "Theorie quantique de la liaison chimique. II. La liaison chimique. Les Cours de Sorbonne. Centre de Documentation Universitaire, Paris V., 1953. 

GEN.132. 1. Prigogine, Science et Culture (Science and Culture), XXV-eme anniversaire de AUPEEF, Universite Paris-Sorbonne, 1986. 

The derivation of the mixture-balance laws has been given by Chapman and Cowling for a binary mixture. Its generalization to multicomponent mixtures, as in Equation 5-1, uses a determination of the invariance of the Boltzmann equation. This development has been detailed by Hirschfelderet These derivations were summarized in the notes of Theodore von Karmin s Sorbonne lectures given in 1951-1952, and the results of his summaries were stated in Pinner s monograph. For turbulent flow, the species-balance equation can be represented in the Boussinesq approximation as ... 

Friedel, C. Crafts, J. M. Compt. Rend. 1877, 84, 1392. Charles Friedel (1832-1899) was born in Strasbourg, France. He earned his Ph.D. in 1869 under Wurtz at Sorbonne and became a professor and later chair (1884) of organic chemistry at Sorbonne. Friedel was one of the founders of the French Chemical Society and served as its president for four terms. James Mason Crafts (1839-1917) was bom in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied under Bunsen and Wurtz in his youth and became a professor at Cornell and MIT. From 1874 to 1891, Crafts collaborated with Friedel at Ecole de Mines in Paris, where they discovered the Friedel-Crafts reaction. He returned to MIT... 

Marie Curie wrote a thesis in physics at the Sorbonne (the first woman to do so), determining the atomic weight of radium 225 1. In 1902 she shared the Nobel Prize with her husband and Henri Becquerel. The Curies did not apply for a patent for radium, presumably because they wished to be known as scholars (at least according to a self-created mythology). It is probable that they simply did not know about the potential industrial uses for radium. 

Henri Moissan, 1852-1907. Professor of Chemistry at the Scole de Pharmacie, and at die Sorbonne. The first to isolate fluorine and make a thorough study of its properties. With Iris electric furnace he prepared artificial diamonds and many rare metals. He brought about a revival of interest in inorganic chemical research. 

Jean Baptiste-Andr Dumas, 1800-1884. Professor of chemistry at the Athenaeum and at the Sorbonne. He devised a method of determining vapor density, and developed the theory of types m organic chemistry, which he defended against Berzelius duahstic electrochemical theory. From a study of the aliphatic alcohols, Dumas and Pehgot developed the conception of homologous series, See also ref. (62). 

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