On 17 February 1869, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev jotted down the symbols for the chemical elements, putting them in order according to their atomic weights and inventing the periodic table. He ...

A century and a half ago, a Russian chemistry professor published a classification of all the known elements, organized by atomic weight. Today, the system that he created for his students — plus some ...

Mendeleev knew when he created the table that there were still gaps and where other elements were meant to be. He was clever enough to predict, however, that in the future new elements would be ...

Advocates of the liberal arts approach to education will love the historical and political backdrop painted by biographer Michael D. Gordin to illustrate the culture of 19th-century Russia during the ...