Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Guyton de Morveau, Louis Bernard, Baron

(Encyclopedia)Guyton de Morveau, Louis Bernard, Baron lwē bĕrnärˈ bärôNˈ gētôNˈ də môrvōˈ [key], 1737–1816, French chemist and lawyer. He wrote the chemical section of the Encyclopédie méthodique ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

Macri, Mauricio

(Encyclopedia)Macri, Mauricio, 1959–, Argentinian political leader. After graduating from the Catholic Univ. of Argentina, he was active in his family's businesses in the 1980s and 90s before becoming president o...

bushido

(Encyclopedia)bushido bo͝oshˈĭdō, bo͞oˈshĭdō [key] [Jap.,=way of the warrior], code of honor and conduct of the Japanese nobility. Of ancient origin, it grew out of the old feudal bond that required unwaver...

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...