Researchers study historical developments of the periodic system of chemical elements

Chemical space and the periodic system of chemical elements. Photo: Thomas Endler/Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences - In the 1860s, the chemists, Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Mendeleev, independently presented the first periodic system. Since then, the well-known tabular arrangement of the elements has been the guiding principle of chemistry. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Leipzig provides computational approaches based on extensive data sets from the Reaxys chemistry database that explain the development of the first periodic systems. Their results are relevant for both the history of science and the future expansion of chemical knowledge. In a recently published article in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS), the scientists look back to the beginnings of the periodic system, whose structure is characterized by similarity and order relationships among the elements. Periodic tables arose from the knowledge of the existing or potentially possible chemical elements and compounds known at that time.