Prague Wall Formulas

16.09.2022

The beauty of physical equations can now be admired in Prague with our first wall formula painting.

 

 

The Heyrovský-Ilkovič equation (derived in 1934).
The Heyrovský-Ilkovič equation describes the polarographic wave. The height of the wave (Ilim) is a measure of concentration of a substance (in a solution) and its position on the potential axis (E1/2) is characteristic of the substance. Polarography is a highly precise method, and relatively cheap, used to determine the presence and concentration of unknown substances in solutions. It was the “queen” of analytic methods of its time. It has been widely used, for example, in industry to determine the composition of raw materials and products, in the field of medicine for the analysis of blood, and in the food industry to determine the concentration of ingredients within food stuffs. To this day, polarography and the methods derived from it are applied as purely physico-chemical methods in solving scientific problems of basic research.

Jaroslav Heyrovský (20.12.1890 - 27.3.1967)
Jaroslav Heyrovský was a Czech scientist and the first Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Charles University. It was in Prague that he discovered polarography in 1922. Heyrovský and his Japanese student Dr. Shikatou built a device that made it possible to obtain the polarography curves automatically, calling it a polarograph. In 1959 Jaroslav Heyrovský became the first Czech person to win the Nobel Prize for his discovery and invention of polarography “one of the most important methods of contemporary chemical analysis”, as said by the committee in his award speech.

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