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Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev's Contributions to Science Essay

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Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born Feb. 8, 1834. Hes was born i na village of Verkhnie Aremzyani near Tobolsk in Siberia. Despite being raised as an Orthodox Christian, he later rejected the religion and embraced a form of deism. Mendeleev is thought to be the youngest of either 11, 13, 14, or 17 siblings. His father was a teacher of fine arts, politics and philosophy. Unfortunately for the family's financial well being, his father became blind and lost his teaching position. His mother was forced to work and she restarted her family's abandoned glass factory.
At the age of 13, after the passing of his father and the destruction of his mother's factory in 1849, his mother took Mendeleev across the entire state of Russia from Siberia …show more content…

He was puzzled about where to put the known lanthanides, and predicted the existence of another row to the table which were the actinides which were some of the heaviest in atomic mass. Some people dismissed Mendeleev for predicting that there would be more elements, but he was proved to be correct when Ga (gallium) and Ge (germanium) were found in 1875 and 1886 respectively, fitting perfectly into the two missing spaces. Later on in life, he created the periodic table.
By giving Sanskrit names to his "missing" elements, Mendeleev showed his appreciation and debt to the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who had created sophisticated theories of language based on their discovery of hte two-dimensional patterns in basic sounds. According to Professor Paul Kiparsky of Stanford University, Mendeleev was a friend and colleague of the Sanskritist Bohtlingk, who was preparing the second edition of his book on Panini at about this time, and Mendeleev wished to honor Panini with his nomenclature. Noting that there are striking similarities between the periodic table and the introductory Siva Sutras in Panini's grammar, Prof. Kiparsky says: "The analogies between the two systems are striking. Just as Panini found that the phonological patterning of sounds in the language is a function of their articulatory properties, so Mendeleev found that the chemical properties of elements are a function of their atomic weights. Like

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