Gerhard Herzberg

Gerhard Herzberg

Gerhard Heinrich Friedrich Otto Julius Herzberg, (German: [ˈɡeːɐ̯.haʁt ˈhɛʁt͡sˌbɛʁk] (listen); December 25, 1904 – March 3, 1999) was a German-Canadian pioneering physicist and physical chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals". Herzberg's main work concerned atomic and molecular spectroscopy. He is well known for using these techniques that determine the structures of diatomic and polyatomic molecules, including free radicals which are difficult to investigate in any other way, and for the chemical analysis of astronomical objects. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Gerhard Herzberg has received more than 140,054 page views. His biography is available in 52 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 49 in 2019). Gerhard Herzberg is the 191st most popular chemist (down from 178th in 2019), the 1,064th most popular biography from Germany (up from 1,088th in 2019) and the 39th most popular German Chemist.

Herzberg was a psychologist who studied the relationship between job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction. He found that there are two factors that lead to job satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The first is the intrinsic factors, which are things like the nature of the work, one's own capabilities, and the degree of responsibility. The second is the extrinsic factors, which are things like pay, working conditions, and supervision.