István Hargittai

István Hargittai (born August 11, 1941 in Budapest ) is a Hungarian chemist and author. He is Professor of General and Analytical Chemistry at the TU Budapest .

István Hargittai

Life

István Hargittai received his diploma from Lomonosov University in 1965, received his doctorate from Lorand Eötvös University in 1972 and completed his habilitation in 1976 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (doctorate in the Russian system).

From 1965 he conducted research at the Center for Chemical Structures of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and from 1973 at its Research Institute for Chemistry. From 1976 to 1979 he headed the electron diffraction and quantum chemistry group and from 1979 to 1986 the structural studies department at the Research Laboratory for Inorganic Chemistry. He is professor at the Institute for General and Analytical Chemistry at the Technical University of Budapest (1991 to 1996 head of the institute) and part-time head of the structural chemistry research group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at Lorand Eötvös University.

He was visiting professor at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, at the University of Texas at Austin (where he was a visiting scholar in 1969/70), at Technion , Caltech , the University of London (Royal Society Visiting Professor, Birkbeck College) and the University of North Carolina in Wilmington and visiting scholar at the University of Oslo (1968, 1975, 1981), the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory . In 1992 he was visiting professor at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

He deals with structural chemistry, stereochemistry of sulfur and silicon, complex chemistry , metal halides , unstable molecules, chemistry at high temperatures, electron diffraction in gas phase, interaction of experimental techniques with theoretical chemistry, differences in structure in solid phase and gas phase, intra- and intermolecular interaction, Models of molecular geometry and the history and cultural history of chemistry.

He is also known as an author on the history of science, especially Hungarian mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century, and symmetry in the natural sciences.

In 1987 he became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and he is a member of the Academia Europaea (1994) and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences (1988). In 1992 he received an honorary doctorate from Lomonosov University in Moscow and in 2000 from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington .

He is editor of Structural Chemistry and was editor of Chemical Intelligencer from 1995 to 2000 .

His wife Magdolna Hargittai (* 1945), with whom he collaborates and publishes, is a research professor for chemistry at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (and its member).

Fonts (selection)

• with Magdolna Hargittai: Symmetry through the eyes of a chemist, Springer Verlag, 3rd edition 2010
• with Magdolna Hargittai: Visual Symmetry, World Scientific 2009
• with Magdolna Hargittai: In our own image. Personal symmetry in discovery, Plenum Press 2000
• with Magdolna Hargittai: Symmetry, a new way of seeing the world, Rowohlt Taschenbuch 1998
  • English edition: Symmetry, a unifying concept, Shelter Publ., 1994, Random House 1996
• Five Martians of Science - five physicists that changed the 20th century, Oxford University Press 2006 (biography of John von Neumann , Leo Szilard , Edward Teller , Eugene Wigner , Theodore von Karman )
• The road to Stockholm: Nobel prizes, science and scientists, Oxford University Press 2002
• Editor Candid Science , Volumes 1–6, Imperial College Press 2000 to 2006 (interviews with scientists)
• Judging Edward Teller: A Closer Look at One of the Most Influential Scientists of the Twentieth Century, Prometheus Books 2010
• Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist, Budapest, Akad. Kiado 2004
• with A. Domenicano: Strength from Weakness: Structural consequences of Weak Interactions in Molecules, Supramolecules, and Crystals, Kluwer 2002
• with A. Domenicano: Accurate Molecular Structure, Oxford UP 1992
• Published in: Fivefold symmetry, World Scientific 1992
• Editor with Clifford Pickover : Spiral Symmetry, World Scientific 1992
• Editor with M. Hargittai Advances in Molecular Structure Research , Volumes 1-6, JAI Press, Greenwich / Connecticut 1995-2000
• Buried Glory - Portraits of Soviet Scientists, Oxford University Press 2013 (13 scientists, including Sakharov, Tamm, Landau, Nikolai Semenow, Kapitza, Vitali Ginzburg, Alexei Abrikosov, Zhabotinsky, Belousov, Khariton, Zeldovich)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Directory of members: István Hargittai. Academia Europaea, accessed on September 28, 2017 . 

Web links

• Literature by and about István Hargittai in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage