This list of chemical elements named after people includes elements named for people both directly and indirectly. Of the 118 elements, 19 are connected with the names of 20 people. 15 elements were named to honor 16 scientists (as curium honours both Marie and Pierre Curie). Four others have indirect connection to the names of non-scientists.[1] Only gadolinium and samarium occur in nature; the rest are man-made.
List
These 19 elements are connected to the names of people. Seaborg and Oganessian were the only living persons honored by having elements named after them; Oganessian is the only one still alive. Names were proposed to honor Einstein and Fermi while they were still alive, but they had both died by the time those names became official.[2]
Other element names connected with people (real or mythological) have been proposed but failed to gain official international recognition. The following such names received past significant use among scientists:
cassiopeium after the constellation Cassiopeia, hence indirectly connected to the mythological Cassiopeia (now lutetium);
selenium: named for the Moon being associated with the deity Selene,
palladium: named for the then-recently discovered asteroid Pallas which had been named for the deity Pallas Athena,
cerium: named for the then-recently discovered asteroid Ceres which had been named for the deity Ceres,
europium: named for the continent that had been named after Europa.
Titanium is unique in that it refers to a group of deities rather than any particular individual. So Helios, Selene, Pallas, and Prometheus actually have two elements named in their honor.
And for elements given a name connected with a group, there is also xenon, named for the Greek word ξένον (xenon), neuter singular form of ξένος (xenos), meaning 'foreign(er)', 'strange(r)', or 'guest'.[6][7]
Its discoverer William Ramsay intended this name to be an indication of the qualities of this element in analogy to the generic group of people.
Gallium was discovered by French scientist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who named it in honor of France ("Gallia" in Latin); allegations were later made that he had also named it for himself, as "gallus" is Latin for "le coq", but he denied that this had been his intention.[8]
^"115-ый элемент Унунпентиум может появиться в таблице Менделеева". oane.ws (in Russian). 28 August 2013. Retrieved 23 September 2015. В свою очередь, российские физики предлагают свой вариант – ланжевений (Ln) в честь известного французского физика-теоретика прошлого столетия Ланжевена.
^Anonymous (1904). Daniel Coit Gilman; Harry Thurston Peck; Frank Moore Colby (eds.). The New International Encyclopædia. Dodd, Mead and Company. p. 906.