Background
Jaroslav Heyrovsky was born on December 20, 1890, in Prague, Czech Republic.
Jaroslav Heyrovsky was born on December 20, 1890, in Prague, Czech Republic.
He was educated at the universities of London and Prague.
In 1913 he became a demonstrator in chemistry at University College in London. Appointed in 1920 an assistant in the chemistry department of Charles University, Prague, he was successively lecturer and assistant professor, and from 1926 to 1954 headed the department of physical chemistry. In 1922 he received recognition for the development of polarography, a method of electrochemical analysis for detecting unknown substances in complex chemical solutions, which quickly became an indispensable tool in analytical chemistry. In 1933 he visited the United States as Carnegie Visiting Professor at the University of California.
(An introduction for chemistry students.)
In 1926 Professor Heyrovsky married Marie (Mary) Koranova, and the couple had two children, a daughter, Judith, and a son, Michael.