Yūji Shibata

Yūji Shibata ( Japanese 柴 田 雄 次 , Shibata Yūji ; born January 28, 1882 in Tokyo Prefecture ; † January 28, 1980 ibid) was a Japanese chemist and is considered the founder of complex chemistry in Japan.

Life

Shibata attended the 1st high school ( Dai-ichi kōtō gakkō ) studied from 1904 at the Imperial University of Tokyo . From 1910 to 1913 he was studying in Europe, first with Arthur Hantzsch in Leipzig, then with Alfred Werner (one of the founders of complex chemistry) in Zurich and then with Georges Urbain in Paris to study spectroscopy . He brought back a spectrometer for chemical investigations from London. On his return he became an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo in 1913, received his doctorate in 1917 and was a professor in 1919 until his retirement in 1947. In addition, he was from 1942 to 1948 professor at the Naval Research Station in Nagoya. He was the Dean of Science at Nagoya University and later President of Tokyo Metropolitan University .

In 1921 he independently and before Paul Job (1928) found a method for determining unstable complex compounds in solution, which was later called the continuous variation method or Job method.

He dealt with the catalytic effect of complex compounds and found in 1934 that certain metal complexes act like enzymes (similar to oxidases).

He was President of the Japanese Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1970 . Shibata also received the appointment of a person with special cultural merit .

His students include Ryūtarō Tsuchida (1903–1962), discoverer of the spectrophotometric series later explained by the ligand field theory , and of Kazuo Yamazaki (1911–2010), who dealt with chemical archeology (especially the wall paintings in the pagoda of Daigo-ji in Kyoto ).

literature

• Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, ISBN 3-8171-1055-3 , p. 396.
• Hitoshi Ohtaki: Development of chemistry in Asia with the cooperation of European countries , in: Bilge Sener (Hrsg.), Innovations in chemical biology , Springer 2009, p. 6f.