Item

Abstract

In recent years physical chemist Zdeněk Herman, who died on 25 February 2021 in Prague, had been increasingly preoccupied with the startling opening of Charles Eliot’s book John Gilley of Baker’s Island: “To be absolutely forgotten in a few years is the common fate of mankind…. With the rarest exceptions, the death of each human individual is followed in a short time by complete oblivion, so far as living human memories are concerned.” Its message was among Zdeněk’s reasons for writing his so-far-unpublished memoir, which is about what, in his view, is memorable about others—and the network of relationships that bonded a community that grew out of a shared interest in chemical-reaction dynamics.