By George B. Kauffman
The Periodic Table & Mendeleev. By Fathi Habashi, Department of Mining, Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Laval University, Quebéc City, Canada, 2017, ISBN 978-2-922686-64-7, vii + 218 pp., paperback, Canadian $40.
The periodic table was developed by chemists more than 100 years ago as a correlation for the properties of the elements. With the discovery of the internal structure of the atom, physicists recognized the periodic table as a natural law. When the crystalline structure of solids was studied, the nature of chemical bonds was understood, and the theory of metals was put forward, becoming an essential tool not only for chemists and for physicists but also for metallurgists as well. The Periodic Table & Mendeleev is a summary of this area of research.
Fathi Habashi is professor emeritus at Laval University in Québec City. He holds a B.Sc. in chemical engineering from the University of Cairo, Egypt; a Dr. techn. degree in inorganic chemical technology, Vienna, Austria; and honorary D. Sc. degrees from the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute, Russia; National Technical University, Lima, Peru; and San Marcos University, Lima, Peru. He held the Canadian Government Scholarship at the Mines Branch in Ottawa, he taught at the Montana College of Mineral Science & Technology and worked at the Extractive Metallurgical Research Division of the Anaconda Company, Tucson, Ariz., before joining Laval University in 1970. His research is directed primarily to organizing the unit operations in extractive metallurgy and placing them into a historical perspective.
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George B. Kauffman, Ph.D., chemistry professor emeritus at Fresno State and a Guggenheim Fellow, is a recipient of the American Chemical Society’s George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education, the Helen M. Free Award for Public Outreach and the Award for Research at an Undergraduate Institution, and numerous domestic and international honors. In 2002 and 2011, he was appointed a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Chemical Society, respectively.
