Paul J. Flory
个人简介P.J.Flory于1910年6月19日生于伊利诺伊州斯特灵。1985年9月9日逝世。1931年毕业于P.J.Flory
印第安纳州Manchester学院化工系，1934年在俄亥俄州州立大学获物理化学博士学位，后任职于杜邦公司，进行高分子基础理论研究。1948年在康奈尔大学任教授。1957年任梅隆科学研究所执行所长。1961年任斯坦福大学化学系教授，1975年退休。1953年当选为美国科学院院士。Flory在高分子物理化学方面的贡献，几乎遍及各个领域。他是实验家又是理论家，是高分子科学理论的主要开拓者和奠基人之一。著有《高分子化学原理》和《长链分子的统计力学》等。由于他在“大分子物理化学实验和理论两方面做出了根本性的贡献”而荣获1974年度诺贝尔化学奖。
成就荣誉Flory在半个多世纪里的研究范围广泛、硕果累累。其中主要有： ① 缩聚反应过程中的相对分子质量分布理论；
② 自由基聚合反应的链转移理论；
③ 体型缩聚反应的凝胶化理论；
④ 橡胶弹性理论；
⑤ 高分子溶液热力学理论；
⑥ 溶液或熔体黏度与分子结构关系；
⑦ 非晶态聚合物本体构象概念；
⑧ 半结晶高聚物的分子形态、液晶高聚物理论等。
这些成果每一项都包括一个广大的领域。例如在高分子溶液的研究方面，20世纪40年代初提出的Flory-Huggins理论揭示了高分子溶液与理想溶液存在巨大偏差的实质，至今仍是高分子科学的里程碑之一。该理论是用于浓溶液体系，对液-液平衡、熔点降低、弹性体溶胀等的处理都获得了满意的结果。Flory在40年代后期开始研究排斥体积效应，提出Θ温度的概念，明确了聚合物分子与溶剂分子间的相互作用、无扰链分子尺寸、以及稀溶液黏度等之间的相互关系。50年代提出Flory-Krigbaum稀溶液理论是该领域的代表性成果。60年代他利用溶液状态方程处理溶剂、聚合物和溶液，推导出混合体积变化、混合热以及由他提出的“作用参数”与浓度的关系，将高分子溶液理论又推进一步。由他建立的溶液理论不仅适用于高分子溶液，用于处理溶液体系同样获得成功。可以这样说，在高分子物理化学中几乎没有未被Flory研究过的领域，在半个多世纪中他共发表论文300余篇。Flory曾出版过两本著名的学术专著《高分子化学原理》和《链分子的统计力学》，其中前一本在美国再版达10次之多，被誉为高分子科学的“圣经”，使高分子科学工作者和学生的必读书目。人们常常将Flory视为高分子科学的奠基者和开拓者，他本人则说，如果要他再从头干一遍的话，它仍然选择高分子，因为“高分子更伟大的发现还在后头”。1985年Flory因心力衰竭而病逝，享年75岁。
Paul J. Flory访华Flory曾于1978和1979年两度访华。作为美方代表团团长，他参加了1979年在北京召开的“中美双边高分子化学及物理学讨论会”，这是在我国首次召开的国际化学学术会议，Flory在会上作了“刚性链高分子的向列型液晶序理论”的报告，交流了最新成果，增进了两国科学界的友谊与合作。
Paul J. Flory自传I was born on 19 June, 1910, in Sterling, Illinois, of Huguenot-German parentage, mine being the sixth generation native to America. My father was Ezra Flory, a clergyman-educator; my mother, nee Martha Brumbaugh, had been a schoolteacher. Both were descended from generations of farmers in the New World. They were the first of their families of record to have attended college.
My interest in science, and in chemistry in particular, was kindled by a remarkable teacher, Carl W. Holl, Professor of Chemistry at Manchester College, a liberal arts college in Indiana, where I graduated in 1931. With his encouragement, I entered the Graduate School of The Ohio State University where my interests turned to physical chemistry. Research for my dissertation was in the field of photochemistry and spectroscopy. It was carried out under the guidance of the late Professor Herrick L. Johnston whose boundless zeal for scientific research made a lasting impression on his students.
Upon completion of my Ph.D. in 1934, I joined the Central Research Department of the DuPont Company. There it was my good fortune to be assigned to the small group headed by Dr. Wallace H. Carothers, inventor of nylon and neoprene, and a scientist of extraordinary breadth and originality. It was through the association with him that I first became interested in exploration of the fundamentals of polymerization and polymeric substances. His conviction that polymers are valid objects of scientific inquiry proved contagious. The time was propitious, for the hypothesis that polymers are in fact covalently linked macromolecules had been established by the works of Staudinger and of Carothers only a few years earlier.
A year after the untimely death of Carothers, in 1937, I joined the Basic Science Research Laboratory of the University of Cincinnati for a period of two years. With the outbreak of World War II and the urgency of research and development on synthetic rubber, supply of which was imperiled, I returned to industry, first at the Esso (now Exxon) Laboratories of the Standard Oil Development Company (1940-43) and later at the Research Laboratory of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (1943-48). Provision of opportunities for continuation of basic research by these two industrial laboratories to the limit that the severe pressures of the times would allow, and their liberal policies on publication, permitted continuation of the beginnings of a scientific career which might otherwise have been stifled by the exigencies of those difficult years.
In the Spring of 1948 it was my privilege to hold the George Fisher Baker Non-Resident Lectureship in Chemistry at Cornell University. The invitation on behalf of the Department of Chemistry had been tendered by the late Professor Peter J. W. Debye, then Chairman of that Department. The experience of this lectureship and the stimulating asociations with the Cornell faculty led me to accept, without hesitation, their offer of a professorship commencing in the Autumn of 1948. There followed a most productive and satisfying period of research and teaching "Principles of Polymer Chemistry," published by the Cornell University Press in 1953, was an outgrowth of the Baker Lectures.
It was during the Baker Lectureship that I perceived a way to treat the effect of excluded volume on the configuration of polymer chains. I had long suspected that the effect would be non-asymptotic with the length of the chain; that is, that the perturbation of the configuration by the exclusion of one segment of the chain from the space occupied by another would increase without limit as the chain is lengthened. The treatment of the effect by resort to a relatively simple "smoothed density" model confirmed this expectation and provided an expression relating the perturbation of the configuration to the chain length and the effective volume of a chain segment. It became apparent that the physical properties of dilute solutions of macromolecules could not be properly treated and comprehended without taking account of the perturbation of the macromolecule by these intramolecular interactions. The hydrodynamic theories of dilute polymer solutions developed a year or two earlier by Kirkwood and by Debye were therefore reinterpreted in light of the excluded volume effect. Agreement with a broad range of experimental information on viscosities, diffusion coefficients and sedimentation velocities was demonstrated soon thereafter.
Out of these developments came the formulation of the hydrodynamic constant called theta, and the recognition of the Theta point at which excluded volume interactions are neutralized. Criteria for experimental identification of the Theta point are easily applied. Ideal behavior of polymers, natural and synthetic, under Theta conditions has subsequently received abundant confirmation in many laboratories. These findings are most gratifying. More importantly, they provide the essential basis for rational interpretation of physical measurements on dilute polymer solutions, and hence for the quantitative characterization of macromolecules.
In 1957 my family and I moved to Pittsburgh where I undertook to establish a broad program of basic research at the Mellon Institute. The opportunity to achieve this objective having been subsequently withdrawn, I accepted a professorship in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University in 1961. In 1966, I was appointed to the J. G. Jackson - C. J. Wood Professorship in Chemistry at Stanford.
The change in situation upon moving to Stanford afforded the opportunity to recast my research efforts in new directions. Two areas have dominated the interests of my co-workers and myself since 1961. The one concerns the spatial configuration of chain molecules and the treatment of their configuration-dependent properties by rigorous mathematical methods; the other constitutes a new approach to an old subject, namely, the thermodynamics of solutions.
Our investigations in the former area have proceeded from foundations laid by Professor M. V. Volkenstein and his collaborators in the Soviet Union, and were supplemented by major contributions of the late Professor Kazuo Nagai in Japan. Theory and methods in their present state of development permit realistic, quantitative correlations of the properties of chain molecules with their chemical constitution and structure. They have been applied to a wide variety of macromolecules, both natural and synthetic, including polypeptides and polynucleotides in the former category. The success of these efforts has been due in no small measure to the outstanding students and research fellows who have collaborated with me at Stanford during the past thirteen years. A book entitled "Statistical Mechanics of Chain Molecules", published in 1969, summarizes the development of the theory and its applications up to that date.
Mrs. Flory, the former Emily Catherine Tabor, and I were married in 1936. We have three children: Susan, wife of Professor George S. Springer of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan; Melinda, wife of Professor Donald E. Groom of the Department of Physics at the University of Utah; and Dr. Paul John Flory, Jr., currently a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Medical Nobel Institute in Stockholm. We have four grandchildren: Elizabeth Springer, Mary Springer, Susanna Groom and Jeremy Groom.
Paul J. Flory died in 1985.
Paul J. Flory was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his fundamental achievements, both theoretical and experimental, in the physical chemistry of the macromolecules.