Chemist — Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (Tobolsk 1834 – St Petersburg 1907) was a Russian chemist, the youngest of a very large Siberian family. In 1869 he published the first version of the periodic table of the elements, arranging them by increasing atomic weight and grouping together those with similar chemical properties. The revolutionary power of his table lay in its predictive capacity: Mendeleev left blank spaces and predicted the existence and properties of then-unknown elements, such as gallium, scandium and germanium, which were later actually discovered. The confirmation of these predictions established the periodic table as one of the pillars of chemistry and atomic physics.
Fun fact
Despite the enormous importance of his work he never received the Nobel Prize; in his honour, artificial element number 101 was named mendelevium.
Theories and contributions
- Periodic table of the elements — Elements arranged by increasing atomic number show a periodicity of chemical properties.
- Periodic law — The properties of the elements are a periodic function of their weight (today, atomic number); it made it possible to predict elements still unknown.
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Linked atoms
1 linked atoms.