Abstract
PROF. JOHANNES NICOLAUS BRØNSTED died in Copenhagen on December 17, 1947, after holding the University chair of physical chemistry for nearly forty years. He was born in 1879 and spent his childhood in Jutland, where his father was employed as an engineer in connexion with land reclamation. Both his parents died while he was still a boy, and after going to school in Aarhus and Copenhagen, he began training as an engineer at the Polytechnic Institute in Copenhagen in 1898. However, it soon became clear that his interests were in chemistry, and he took the Magister degree in this subject in 1902, being appointed as assistant at the University Chemical Laboratory in 1905. He very soon became engrossed in the application of thermodynamics to physico-chemical problems, a subject which was to prove a central theme in all his subsequent work. A long series of papers in the years 1906-21 dealt with the theory and measurement of affinity changes, and it was the third of this series (dealing with binary mixtures) which was presented for his doctorate degree in 1908. In 1909 he was appointed (after close competition with Niels Bjerrum) to the newly instituted chair of physical chemistry, and was also made director of the physical chemistry laboratory of the Polytechnic Institute, where a great deal of his later work was carried out.
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BELL, R. Prof. J. N. BrØnsted. Nature 161, 269 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161269a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161269a0