Prof. N. S. Kurnakov

BY the death of Prof. N. S. Kurnakov on March 19, at the age of eighty, Russia has lost a pioneer physical chemist whose work and influence, great in his own country, extended far beyond its borders. His early training some sixty years ago in the St. Petersburg Mining Institute must have largely influenced the trend of his subsequent work, which was mainly concerned with the applications of the principles of the phase rule to the study of binary systems, more especially alloys and salt mixtures, and with the development of the mineral resources of Russia. Kurnakov was one of the first to devise and use recording pyrometers for the thermal study of alloys and binary mixtures generally, and he was particularly interested in the variations of viscosity and of hardness which accompany changes of composition in such systems. He founded one of the chief schools of inorganic chemistry in the U.S.S.R., and right to the end of his life was director of the Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.