John Polanyi

In 1958, John Polanyi married Anne Ferrar Davidson. He has two children; a daughter named Margaret (born 1961), who is a journalist, and a son named Michael (born 1963), who is a physicist turned political scientist. Anne died in 2013. Polanyi is presently married to portrait artist, Brenda Bury.

Apart from science and politics, he is interested in arts, literature and poetry. In his youth he was a passionate white water canoeist but later on switched to walking and skiing.

The Ontario government created the ‘John Charles Polanyi Prizes’ as a tribute to his Nobel Prize win. Each prize is worth $20,000 and awarded to young postdoctoral scholars or new faculty members of Ontario University, in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics and Literature categories.

John Polanyi was born on 23 January 1929, in Berlin, Germany to emigrant Hungarian parents, Michael and Magda Elizabeth Polanyi. Michael was a renowned chemist and philosopher who did revolutionary work on the mechanisms of elemental reactions.

His family consisted of other learned members as well. His grandfather, Mihaly Pollacsek, was a successful railway builder while his uncle, Karl (1886-1964) was one of the leading economists of his time. His grandmother was also an active intellectual figure.

His father was born Jewish but later converted to Catholicism. Hence, when Adolf Hitler began his atrocities against the Jews, his family migrated to Britain, in 1933.

When John was eleven years old, World War II had already begun. To keep him safe from German bombings, his father sent him to Toronto, Canada for three years. While living in Toronto, he attended the University of Toronto Schools.

After returning to Britain, he finished high school and entered Manchester University in 1946. He received his undergraduate degree in 1949 and his Ph.D degree in Chemistry in 1952. His area of research was on determining the strengths of chemical bonds in compounds that have been exposed to very high temperatures.

After completing his Ph.D. studies in 1952, he joined the National Research Council in Ottawa, Ontario for postdoctoral research. During that time, he collaborated with E.W.R. Steacie and worked briefly in the laboratory of future Nobel laureate Gerhard Herzberg.

In 1954, he became a research associate at Princeton University following which, in 1956 he returned to Canada and became a Lecturer in Chemistry at the University of Toronto.

He made steady progress in his teaching career and was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1957. Three years later in 1960, he became Associate Professor and in 1962, he was promoted to full Professor. In 1974, he was named University Professor, a position he still retains.

In 1958, Polanyi and his graduate student, Kenneth Cashion, published their initial findings on infrared ‘chemiluminescence’ (the emanation of light by an atom or molecule that is in an energised condition).

The measurement of this very weak emission helped to establish the quantum mechanical energy state of the molecules and chart the reaction. This further helped in the construction of a ‘vibrational’ laser that made significant contributions to science and medicine.

John Polanyi is known for his work in chemical kinetics. He developed the technique of infrared chemiluminescence, which was used to measure weak infrared emissions from a newly formed molecule in order to examine energy disposal during a chemical reaction.