Linus Carl Pauling

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Pauling, Linus Carl

 

Born Feb. 28, 1901, in Portland, Ore. American physicist, chemist, and public figure.

Pauling graduated from Oregon State College in 1922. In 1926 and 1927 he was a postdoctorate fellow at the universities of Munich, Copenhagen, and Zürich. He taught and conducted research at the California Institute of Technology from 1922 to 1925 and from 1927 to 1964. He was made a full professor at Cal Tech in 1931. Beginning in 1969, he was a professor of chemistry at Stanford University. He was president of the American Chemical Society for 1949 and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Pauling’s major works have been devoted to the study of the structure of molecules and the nature of the chemical bond by the methods of quantum mechanics. He calculated the values of ionic radii and arranged them in tables and formulated some of the general rules for the formation of ionic crystalline structures. He also gave a quantum-mechanical description of the homeopolar bond and explained the directed nature of valence. Pauling devoted a series of studies to biochemistry, especially to the structure of proteins, immunochemistry, and the study of diseases on a molecular level (sickle-cell anemia).

Pauling has consistently supported peace. One of the initiators of the Pugwash conferences, Pauling was also the author in 1957 of a petition from American scientists to the US president demanding the immediate cessation of the testing of nuclear weapons. In the following year he drew up a similar petition that was presented to the UN and that was signed by more than 9,000 scientists from various countries. In his book No More War!, published in 1958, Pauling wrote: “The time has now come for man’s intellect to win out over the brutality, the insanity of war.” In 1965, Pauling signed the Declaration of Civil Disobedience and Conscience Against the War in Vietnam.

Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, and the International Lenin Peace Prize in 1970. He has been a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR since 1958.

WORKS

The Structure of Line Spectra. New York-London, 1930. (With S. Coudsmit.)
Introduction to Quantum Mechanics: With Applications to Chemistry. New York-London, 1935. (With E. Bright Wilson.)
College Chemistry, 3rd ed. San Francisco, 1964.
The Architecture of Molecules. San Francisco-London, 1964. (With R. Hayward.)
The Chemical Bond. New York, 1967.
Vitamin C and the Common Cold. San Francisco, 1971.
In Russian translation:
Priroda khimicheskoi sviazi Moscow-Leningrad, 1947.
Ne byvat’ voinel Moscow, 1960.
Obshchaia khimiia, 3rd ed. Moscow, 1974.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.