Nikolai N. Semenov
Semenov, Nikolai N. (1896-1986) was a Soviet chemist. He won the 1956 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on chemical chain reactions. Semenov shared the prize with the British chemist Cyril Hinshelwood, who independently did similar research. Semenov was the first Soviet citizen to win a Nobel Prize.
Semenov was born on April 3, 1896, in Saratov, Russia. He graduated from Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) State University in 1917. That year, a political group called the Bolsheviks (later called Communists) took over the Russian government. During the civil war that followed from 1918 to 1920, Semenov lectured at Tomsk University in Siberia. In 1920, he became a lecturer at the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute. In December 1922, the Communist government established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), also called the Soviet Union. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in 1924.
Semenov was promoted to professor at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute in 1928. In 1931, he became director of the Institute of Chemical Physics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a position he held for the rest of his life. He became a full member of the academy in 1932.
Semenov did his most important work on chemical chain reactions in the 1920's and early 1930's. He summarized this research in his book Tsepnye reaktsii (Chemical Kinetics and Chain Reactions), published in 1934.
When the Soviet Academy of Sciences moved to Moscow in 1944, Semenov also began teaching at Moscow University. Semenov died on Sept. 25, 1986, in Moscow.