Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Woodward, Robert Burns

(Encyclopedia)Woodward, Robert Burns, 1917–80, American chemist and educator, b. Boston, grad. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.B., 1936; Ph.D., 1937). He taught at Harvard from 1938, becoming Donner prof...

Berthollet, Claude Louis, Comte

(Encyclopedia)Berthollet, Claude Louis, Comte klōd lwē, kôNt bĕrtōlāˈ [key], 1748–1822, French chemist. His contributions to chemistry include the analysis of ammonia and prussic acid and the discovery of ...

Richards, Theodore William

(Encyclopedia)Richards, Theodore William, 1868–1928, American chemist, b. Germantown, Pa., Ph.D. Harvard, 1888. Richards was a professor at Harvard from 1891 until his death in 1928. In 1914 he received the Nobel...

Love Canal

(Encyclopedia)Love Canal, section of Niagara Falls, N.Y., that formerly contained a canal that was used as chemical disposal site. In the 1940s and 50s the empty canal was used by a chemical and plastics company to...

catabolism

(Encyclopedia)catabolism kətăbˈəlĭzˌəm [key], subdivision of metabolism involving all degradative chemical reactions in the living cell. Large polymeric molecules such as polysaccharides, nucleic acids, and ...

compound

(Encyclopedia)compound, in chemistry, a substance composed of atoms of two or more elements in chemical combination, occurring in a fixed, definite proportion and arranged in a fixed, definite structure. A compound...

Fermat, Pierre de

(Encyclopedia)Fermat, Pierre de pyĕr də fĕrmäˈ [key], 1601–65, French mathematician. A magistrate whose avocation was mathematics, Fermat is known as a founder of modern number theory and probability theory....

Sun Ra

(Encyclopedia) Sun Ra, 1914-1993, African-American jazz composer, bandleader, and keyboard player, b. Birmingham, Al., as Herman Poole Blount. Sun Ra was a leading c...

Eigen, Manfred

(Encyclopedia)Eigen, Manfred, 1927–2019, German biophysicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Göttingen, 1951. Eigen was on the faculty at the Univ. of Göttingen from 1951 to 1953. He joined the Max Planck Institute for Physica...

pesticide

(Encyclopedia)pesticide, biological, physical, or chemical agent used to kill plants or animals that are harmful to people; in practice, the term pesticide is often applied only to chemical agents. Various pesticid...