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Ivan Knunyants

Ivan Lyudvigovich Knunyants
Born	Shusha, Elisabethpol Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	Armenian
Citizenship	Soviet Union

Ivan Lyudvigovich Knunyants (Russian: Иван Людвигович Кнунянц; Armenian: Իվան Լյուդվիգի Կնունյանց; )

sources

Editorial Board (1966). "Иван Людвигович Кнунянц". Chemical Journal of Armenia (in Russian). 19 (6).

Gevorgyan, A. (2006). "Иван Людвигович Кнунянц (к 100-лтию со дня рождения)". Chemical Journal of Armenia (in Russian). 59 (4): 3–6.

"Knunyants Ivan Ludvigovich (1906–1990)". Nesmeyanov Institute of Organoelement Compounds. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015.

"Кнунянц Иван Людвигович". isaran.ru (in Russian). Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 18 February 2020.

Babayan, A. (1979). "Կնունյանց Իվան [Knunyants Ivan]". Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia Volume 5 (in Armenian). p. 497.

Organofluorine chemistry "You have created a Soviet school of organofluorine chemists whose work has gained worldwide recognition."

KNUNYANTS, IVAN LUDVIGOVICH (1906-1990). Soviet chemist. Knunyants was born in Shusha, in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of present-day Azerbaijan, and rose to prominence as an internationally famed academic chemist. His fundamental contributions to organophosphorus and organosulfur chemistry were valuable to the Soviet chemical weapons (CW) program. Knunyants's brilliance was recognized early in his career, and he rose rapidly, being elected an academician (the highest rank) in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR at age 47. His work on organofluorine chemistry aided Soviet development of organophosphorus nerve agents, especially sarin and soman. In 1972, this work was recognized by his receipt of the Lenin Prize, the most prestigious award in the USSR. Knunyants devoted much effort to understanding the relationship between molecular structure and physiological activity. Although his interests were principally theoretical and basic research, the results heavily influenced development of novel CW agents.

One does not have to go very deeply into the history of Soviet fluorine chemistry to come across the name Ivan Lyudvigovich Knunyants. A Professor at INEOS and Major-General at the S. K. Timoshenko Military Academy of Chemical Defence, Knunyants literally inspired generations of Russian fluorine chemists2. Born in 1906, he was a pupil of A. E. Chichibabin and his achievements are by no means limited to organofluorine chemistry, a field he began to develop in 1941. Much of his early work concentrated on probing and rationalising the unusual chemical behaviour of fluoro-olefins (particularly perfluo-rinated examples such as CF3CF=CF2 and (CF3)2C=CF2) and related compounds (this was reviewed in 1974 [2]), and his sizeable team also carried out much of the fundamen-tal chemistry underpinning the development of fluorocarbons, on which a large industrial effort in the Soviet period was subsequently based. With more than 1300 publications (in-cluding about 200 patents) to his credit, the majority dealing with organofluorine com-pounds [1, 3], it is perfectly understandable why Knunyants2 is viewed as one of the giants of modern fluorine chemistry.

Knunyants could, as one of his pupils told me, 'inspire either love, hatred or fear' —usually the first of these emotions — but never indifference. The source of the inspiration he provided to so many lay in the fact that, as Knunyants himself said, 'he was above all preoccupied with the psychology of fluorine as much as its anatomy or physiology' — in other words the behaviour of a then still largely unexplored element. He was very much the model of the best type of Soviet scientist, combining imagination with a classically rigorous and systematic approach to research — even those of his pupils who revere him still recall coming under his the lash for such misdemeanours as not adequately recording their experiments — and broader intellectual interests, in Knunyants' case chess and picture collecting and restoring. But perhaps his defining feature was that, despite his reputation and influence as an Academician and sometime President of the Mendeleev Chemical Society (as well as chief consultant to the military on chemical matters), Knunyants was a liberal figure, free of the conceit which characterised some senior people in the Soviet scientific hierarchy. The members of his school were relatively free from ideological pressures and could choose their research under his patronage. His death in 1990, which coincided with the final months of the Soviet era, might be seen as the closing of a chapter of the history of Russian science.

One of Knunyants' early postgraduate students, Aleksandr Vasil'evich Fokin, emerged as a leading fluorine chemist in his own right. Born in 1912, Fokin spent most of the earlier part of his career at the Chemical Defence Academy before becoming the deputy scientific secretary of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences and (from 1974) a member at INEOS, of which he was Director from 1980-88. In the post-war pe-riod, he began (together with Knunyants) to carry out seminal synthetic and mechanistic studies on organofluorine compounds, particularly fluoro-olefins. Like Knunyants his work in organic chemistry extended beyond fluorine, into such areas as industrial routes to ethy-lene oxide and propylene oxide and the synthesis and production of new phosphorus- and sulphur-containing materials for use in the recovery and purification of non-ferrous met-als; also like Knunyants, he was widely respected by his colleagues. Professor Fokin died in mid-1998, just as I was finishing this article. Though evidently infirm, he generously agreed to speak to me during a visit to INEOS in 1997 and asked to be remembered to his British colleagues, some of whom still recall his impressive singing voice heard during one of his visits to the West.

Acknowledgements. I count myself very fortunate to have met, during my research career, chemical scholars whose input enabled me to make my conformational knowledge active; it is my pleasure to acknowledge them. First of all, I mention Academician Professor Ivan L. Knunyanz (also spelled Knunyants), the pioneer of fluoroorganic chemistry in the USSR and the founder of the related chemical industry there; Head of the —60-member fluoroorganic laboratory at Organoelement Institute, Sci-ence Academy, Moscow. Thanks to this liberally thinking great chemical scientist and man, I had accomplished my Ph.D. studies in this purely syn-thetic group as an independent researcher dealing with both synthesis and conformational analysis of model compounds which had seemed to me conformationally interesting, i.e. as exactly as I had desired realizing that reacting molecules are conformer ensembles.

External links

photos

http://www.ras.ru/win/DB/show_per.asp?P=id-50742.oi-1.vi-.fi-.uk-10

http://www.ras.ru/win/DB/show_per.asp?P=.id-50742.ln-ru.dl-.pr-inf.uk-12

http://visualrian.ru/media/530714.html