Text 1. Mykhailo tuhan-baranovsky

Mykhailo Tuhan-Baranovsky was born on January 8, 1865 in the village of Soliane, in the province of Kharkiv in Ukraine. On graduating from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Kharkiv University (1888), he studied political economy and statistics at the Faculty of Jurisprudence at Kharkiv University, passing the master’s examination, and completed his training as an economist with periods of study in St. Petersburg, Paris (1889), Moscow and London (1892). His first work “A Study of the Marginal Utility of Economic Goods” (1890), and above all his doctoral dissertation

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The Industrial Crises in Industrial England (1894), his masterpiece dedicated to the study of business cycles, gained him the position of assistant professor of political economy in the Faculty of Jurisprudence at St. Petersburg University (January 1895). However, Tuhan’s active participation in the debates of the Third Section of the Imperial Free Economic Society, of which he became director in 1896, and the editorial writings of the “Legal Marxists” of St. Petersburg led to the suspension of his nomination by the minister of public education until December 1905.

His fundamental work “The Russian Factory, Past and Present” (1898) and the subsequent translation of his major works into German, English, French and Spanish -among them, “The Theoretical Foundations of Marxism” (1905) and “Modem Socialism in its Historical Development” (1906) - made Tuhan “the most eminent” Slav economist of that period, and “the most important figure of international theoretical revisionism”. From 1905 onwards, finally distancing himself from Marxism, Tuhan worked with the daily newspaper of Russian cadets “Rech” and was recajled to the Faculty of Jurisprudence at St. Petersburg University as assistant professor. In 1913 he was appointed to the Chair of Political Economy. In spite of the merit of his teaching and scientific research, culminating in his “Foundations of Political Economy” (1909), a new veto by the minister forced him to resign, and from 1913 to 1917, he worked at the Department of Economics of the Imperial Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg.

Gradually coming to share the aspirations, ideals and political programmes of the Ukrainian national and cooperative movement - his “Social Foundations of Coope­ration” was published in 1916 - Tuhan left Petrograd for Kyiv in the summer of 1917; in August 1917 he took up the post of the Minister of Finance in the General Secretariat of the Ukrainian Central Rada, representing the Ukrainian Party of the Socialist Federalists. In 1918 he became Head and organizer of the Ukrainian Academy’s Third (Socio-Economic) Department and of the Institute*for the Study of Cycles attached to the Academy. Sent as an economic adviser with the Ukrainian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference on January 8, 1919, he died on a train at the railroad station in Oradne between Kyiv and Odesa.

(Taken from Selected Contributions of Ukrainian Scholars to Economics by I.S. Koropecky, published by Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1984)

Text 2. ROALD HOFFMANN

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine). He immigrated to the United States with his family in 1949. He graduated from Columbia University (1958) and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962. He collaborated with Robert B. Woodward at Harvard during the next three years and then joined the Cornell University faculty in 1965.

Roald Hoffmann has made numerous contributions in the field of chemistry, most notably in the area of geometrical structure and reactivity of molecules. His con­tributions have earned him numerous honours, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in

Ukrainian names in world science

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Chemistry shared with Kenichi Fukui (Japan). Hoffmann and his collaborator, R. B. Woodward, developed the Woodward-Hoffmann rules governing the course of certain chemical reactions based on the electronic structures of the reactants. Hoffmann undertook the research leading to his share of the prize when he and Woodward sought an explanation of the unexpected course taken by a reaction that Woodward and his colleagues had hoped to use in the synthesis of the complicated molecule of vitamin B. Hoffmann and Woodward discovered that many reactions involving the formation or breaking of rings of atoms take courses that depend on an identifiable symmetry in the mathematical descriptions of the molecular orbitals that undergo the most change. Their theory, expressed in a set of statements now called the Woodward-Hoffmann rules, accounts for the failure of certain cyclic compounds to form from apparently appropriate starting materials, though others are readily produced; it also clarifies the geometric arrangement of the atoms in the products formed when the rings in cyclic compounds are broken.

In addition to sharing the Nobel Prize, the American Chemical Society has honoured him with the Priestley Medal, the Arthur C. Cope Award in Organic Chemistry, and the American Chemical Society Award in Inorganic Chemistry. He received also Pimentel Award in Chemical Education, Award in Pure Chemistry, Monsanto Award, National Medal of Science. Hoffmann is currently professor of chemistry at Cornell University, focusing in the area of applied theoretical chemistry.

Roald Hoffmann has been very active in communicating.science to non-scientists, and he is also an accomplished poet and writer. He published two scientific-popular books: Chemistry Imagined: Reflections on Science (1993) and The Same and Not the Same (1995). In 1993, Hoffmann hosted a 26-segment television documentary on the Public Broadcasting Service entitled The World of Chemistry.

Roald Hoffmann became a prominent member of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

Text 3. HERBERT BROWN. NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY (1979).