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| Russian
physical chemist who studied chemical chain reactions, particularly branched-chain
reactions, which can accelerate with explosive velocity. For his work in
this area, in 1956 he became the first Russian to gain the Nobel Prize for
Chemistry. Semenov was born in Saratov and studied at Petrograd (now St Petersburg). He became professor at the Physical-Technical Institute there 1928. He was director of the Institute for Chemical Physics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences 1931-44, and then moved to Moscow State University. Semenov did his Nobel prizewinning work in the 1920s and summarized his results in his book Chemical Kinetics and Chain Reactions 1934. Semenov also played an important part in resisting narrow interpretations of Marxism-Leninism in its application to chemistry. |