CBC Celebrates Arab American Heritage Month

April is Arab American Heritage Month!

Did you know…?

• The word chemistry comes from the word alchemy, which in turn is derived from the Arabic word al-kīmīā (الكیمیاء) and may ultimately derive from the ancient Egyptian word kemi, meaning black.

Do you know…?

• Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (died c. 806−816), popularly known as the father of chemistry, is the supposed author of an enormous number and variety of works in Arabic. Jabir's works contain the oldest known systematic classification of chemical substances, and the oldest known instructions for deriving an inorganic compound (ammonium chloride) from organic substances (such as plants, blood, and hair) by chemical means.
• E.J. Corey (b. 1928) was born to Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christian immigrants. In 1990, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis," specifically retrosynthetic analysis.
• Ahmed Hassan Zewail (1946-2016) was an Egyptian-American chemist. He is widely known as the “father of femtochemistry,” the study of chemical reactions on extremely short timescales, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999.
• Omar M. Yaghi (b. 1965) is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California and the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute. A pioneer in reticular chemistry, a field devoted to bonding molecular building blocks to fabricate, e.g. metal organic frameworks (MOFs), Yaghi is the recipient of the Wolf Prize among many other prestigious awards.
• Mostafa A. El-Sayed is an Egyptian-American physical chemist, a leading nanoscience researcher, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a US National Medal of Science laureate and a longtime editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry. He is also known for the spectroscopy rule named after him, the El-Sayed rule.
• Mohamed M. Atalla (1924-2009) was an Egyptian-American engineer, physicist, cryptographer, inventor and entrepreneur. He was a semiconductor pioneer who is best known for inventing the MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor) in 1959 (along with his colleague Dawon Kahng), which revolutionized the electronics industry.