Where Does Chemistry Go? From Mendeelev Table of Elements to the Big Data Era

Abstract

One hundred and fifty years ago the Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev published the first “Periodic System of the Elements” originated to display the periodic trends of the chemical elements known at that time
and possibly to predict unknown elements supposed to fill the empty spaces, by predicting their properties. His prevision turned out to be essentially correct. He had about sixty elements in his periodic table of 1869. Other naturally occurring elements were discovered or isolated in the following years, and various further elements have also been produced synthetically. In his honor element 101, discovered in 1905, was named “mendelevium”. The modern periodic table, of 118 elements now, constitutes an important framework for exploring chemical reactions; it provides the basis for the discovery or the synthesis of further new elements and for the development of new theoretical models. Although other chemists at the time of Mendeleev attempted to organize the known chemical elements in a system, the extraordinary and visionary intuition of Mendeleev was to use the trends in his periodic table to predict the properties of missing elements.