Mendeleev to Oganesson: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on the Periodic Table

Since 1969, the international chemistry community has only held conferences on the topic of the Periodic Table three times, and the 2012 conference in Cusco, Peru was the first in almost a decade. The conference was highly interdisciplinary, featuring papers on geology, physics, mathematical and theoretical chemistry, the history and philosophy of chemistry, and chemical education, from the most reputable Periodic Table scholars across the world. Eric Scerri and Guillermo Restrepo have collected fifteen of the strongest papers presented at this conference, from the most notable Periodic Table scholars. The collected volume will contain pieces on chemistry, philosophy of science, applied mathematics, and science education.

Eric Scerri is a leading philosopher of science specializing in the history and philosophy of chemistry and especially the periodic table. He is the author of numerous OUP books including A Tale of Seven Scientists and a New Philosophy of Science (2016) and The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction (2012). Scerri has been a full-time lecturer at UCLA for the past eighteen years where he regularly teaches classes in history and philosophy of science.

Guillermo Restrepo is a chemist specializing in mathematical and philosophy of chemistry with more than sixty scientific papers and book chapters on these and related areas. Restrepo was a professor of chemistry at the Universidad de Pamplona (Colombia) between 2004 and 2017, and since 2014 has been in Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Leipzig University and more recently as researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.