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Hubert Alyea (1903-1996) was a professor of chemistry at Princeton University. His explosive chemistry demonstrations earned him the nickname "Dr. Boom." He was famous around the world for his “zany, eccentric” public lectures on science, which “were as much performance as professorship”. Alyea served as inspiration for the title character in the 1961 film ''The Absent-Minded Professor''. In 1984 he received the Joseph Priestley award. ==Early life and education== Alyea was born in Clifton, New Jersey, on October 10, 1903. He entered Princeton at age 15, but at 19 he contracted polio and spent a year in bed, a time that he reportedly described as “a time of great inner reflection” during which “he emerged with a strong commitment to accomplish something with his life that would contribute to the good of humanity.” After his return to Princeton to complete his undergraduate education, he took chemistry courses, but also many English courses. During these years he also played the cello for the Triangle Club and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After he earned an A.B. in chemistry from Princeton “with highest honors” in 1925, he spent a year at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm, where he was an American-Scandinavian Fellow of the General Electric Company, studying under Dr. Svante August Arrhenius. Alyea's project at the time concerned the idea of a free atom, a concept that many chemists scoffed at but that reportedly interested Arrhenius. Alyea said that Arrhenius “spread joy in the lab". He then returned to Princeton for graduate study, receiving an A.M. in chemistry in 1926 and serving as a Proctor Fellow at Princeton in 1927-28. He was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1928. He then spent brief periods at the University of Minnesota, where, as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, he studied the chemical effects of radium, and at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut in Berlin-Dahlem, where, as an International Research Fellow, he studied the kinetics of gas explosion. He returned to Princeton in 1930 to take up the position of instructor in chemistry. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1934, associate professor in 1944, and full professor in 1954. He retired in 1972, whereafter he bore the title of Professor Emeritus. Among his many research interests were chemical kinetics, chain reactions, and the mechanism of inhibition. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hubert Alyea」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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