ABSTRACT
One day in 1931, an excursion from the Institute for the Mechanical Processing of Mineral Resources (Mekhanobr) visited the catalysis laboratory of the Leningrad Institute of Chemical Physics (ICP) where my husband Simon Zalmanovich Roginskii was a supervisor. The vast majority of participants were adults or even elderly people, with interests far from those of the lab, who clearly didn’t understand the explanations about theoretical investigations of catalysis. Among them, a 17-year-old boy stood out. This young man asked many questions, zeroing in on the key points of the work.
