Anatol Zhabotinsky (1938-2008)

摘要

Anatol Zhabotinsky, the father of nonlinear chemical dynamics, passed away on 16 September after a brief illness. In many ways, his scientific career represents a microcosm of the history of Russia in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Moscow at the height of the Stalinist purges, Zhabotinsky was able to enrol in the prestigious Moscow State University in 1955, during the brief window that opened for Jews in the years following Stalin's death in 1953. Although not a religious man, Zhabotinsky was proud of his Jewish heritage and refused to change his surname to "something more Russian", even when other members of his immediate family did so to improve their prospects in an anti-Semitic society. It was as a graduate student at Moscow State that Zhabotinsky first learned of the phenomenon, now known as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction, for which he was to become famous. In the early 1950s, Boris Belousov, a military research chemist studying the effects of poison gases and radiation on humans, had stumbled upon the fact that a mixture of potassium bromate, citric acid and cerium ions exhibits periodic colour changes.