Semyonov, Nikolay Nikolayevich

Nikolay Nikolayevich Semyonov, Semyonov also spelled Semënov, (born April 15 [April 3, Old Style], 1896, Saratov, Russia—died Sept. 25, 1986, Moscow, U.S.S.R.), Soviet physical chemist who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Sir Cyril Hinshelwood for research in chemical kinetics. He was the second Soviet citizen (after the émigré writer Ivan Bunin) to receive a Nobel Prize.

Semyonov was educated in St. Petersburg, graduating from the city’s university in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, and taught for a time at the University of Tomsk in western Siberia. Associated with the Leningrad A.F. Ioffe Physicotechnical Institute from 1920 to 1931, he became a professor at the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) Polytechnic Institute in 1928. He was director of the Institute of Chemical Physics at the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. after 1931 and became a professor at Moscow State University in 1944.

Like Hinshelwood, Semyonov conducted research on the mechanism of chemical chain reactions and their significance in relation to explosions. Semyonov was the first to show that chain reactions are the norm in chemical transformations of matter. He published the influential book O nekotorykh problemakh khimicheskoy kinetiki i reaktsionnoy sposobnosti (1954; Some Problems in Chemical Kinetics and Reactivity).