Kazimierz Fajans

Kazimierz Fajans
Kazimierz Fajans
Born	(1887-05-27)27 May 1887 Warsaw, Poland
Died	18 May 1975(1975-05-18) (aged 87) Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Institutions	University of Michigan
Known for	Discovery of protactinium Fajans' rules Displacement law Rules for co-precipitation

Kazimierz Fajans (Kasimir Fajans in many American publications; 27 May 1887 – 18 May 1975) was a Polish American physical chemist of Polish-Jewish origin, a pioneer in the science of radioactivity and the discoverer of chemical element protactinium.

He was born May 27, 1887, in Warsaw, Congress Poland, to a family of Jewish background. After he had completed secondary school in Warsaw (1904), he started studying chemistry in Germany, at first at the University in Leipzig, and then in Heidelberg and Zurich. In 1909 he was awarded a PhD degree for his research into the stereoselective synthesis of chiral compounds.

In 1910 Fajans took a job at the laboratory of Ernest Rutherford in Manchester, where the nucleus was discovered. He then returned to Germany where he took the position of an assistant and later became the assistant professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. He researched into radioactivity. In 1917 he took over the Faculty of Physical Chemistry at Munich University, and in 1932 became the Head of the Institute of Physical Chemistry established by the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1935 he left Germany due to the escalation of Nazi persecution. He stayed for a while in Cambridge and next moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States, where he joined the Faculty of the University of Michigan where he continued to work until the end of his life.

He retired at age of seventy but never stopped working. He died May 18, 1975 in Ann Arbor.