Gerhard Herzberg

Gerhard Herzberg: Exploring the Atomic Spectra Dr. Gerhard Herzberg was among the thousands of European mathematicians and scientists who emigrated to North America from Germany and other central European countries during the 1930s. Dr. Herzberg left Germany in 1935 and first took up a guest professorship at The University of Saskatchewan. After a few years at The University of Chicago, he returned to Canada in 1948 and assumed the first of several positions at Canada's National Research...See more

Gerhard Herzberg: Exploring the Atomic Spectra Dr. Gerhard Herzberg was among the thousands of European mathematicians and scientists who emigrated to North America from Germany and other central European countries during the 1930s. Dr. Herzberg left Germany in 1935 and first took up a guest professorship at The University of Saskatchewan. After a few years at The University of Chicago, he returned to Canada in 1948 and assumed the first of several positions at Canada's National Research Council. His classic work on spectroscopy, Atomic Spectra and Atomic Structure was published by Prentice-Hall in 1937 and first reprinted by Dover, with corrections, in 1944. Still in print in 2011, Atomic Spectra and Atomic Structure is now in its 36th Dover printing, by far the record for any Dover scientific book. The retail price of the first Dover edition was $1.95 in 1944, and the book is $13.95 today, surely better than the rate of inflation over the past 67 years. Later in his career, Dr. Herzberg published his encyclopedic four-volume work, Molecular Spectra and Molecular Structure . He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, . . . for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals. See less