מיכאל פולאני

Mihaly Michael Polanyi (Pollacsek)(1891-1976), scientist, born in Budapest, Hungary (then part of Austria-Hungary). He studied at the technical schools of Budapest and Karlsruhe, Germany, and became a lecturer (Privatdozent) at the technical school of Berlin in 1923.

In 1929 he was made a life member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fuer physikalische Chemie, but in 1933 he lost this position, partly as a result of his protest against the introduction of the racial question in the evaluation of scientific achievement. In the same year he went to England where he became professor of physical chemistry at Victoria University, Manchester, and later at Oxford. Polanyi also made a diagrammatic film, "Money and Unemployment" (1939).

In addition to a number of articles on plasticity, crystal structure, absorption and chemical reaction, he published "Atomic Reactions" (1932); "USSR Economics" (1935). In the latter book as well as in "The Contempt of Freedom" (1940) he touched upon questions outside his proper field of research. In his "A magyar forradalom uzenete" ("The Message of the Hungarian Revolution") he raised his voice for freeing from jail freedom fighters of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.