Advanced data analysis and modelling in chemical engineering
In my general chemistry course at the University of Debrecen, I teach that chemistry became an independent science at the end of the 18th century largely thanks to the introduction of systematic quantitative measurements, which was pioneered by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier in France and Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov in Russia. Yet the first two decades of the third millennium have seen the beginning of a highly worrying trend in the chemical sciences, which is also noted in my previous editorial [1] a gradual, but very observable decline in the standards of quantitative evaluation. Chemists seem to increasingly feel that their sole task is to make new materials, and understanding the underlying principles or discovering new laws is not their business any more. Now I am more than pleased to recommend a book [2] for those who share my concerns and wish to see a change in this Zeitgeist. The five authors are extremely accomplished researchers and exceptional scientific minds by any measure. They are no strangers to writing excellent books on chemical kinetics [3, 4] and have also made some very special services to their broad professional community: their combined tally in editing Elsevier's Advances in Chemical Engineering series is no fewer than 10 volumes within the last decade or so, and among them are some of the founding fathers of the international conference and workshop titled Mathematics in Chemical Kinetics and Chemical (Bio)Engineering (MaCKiE) Four of the five authors are affiliated with Ghent University, but the only exception, Gregory S. Yablonsky (St. Louis University) also has strong ties to this Belgian institution. All of them are very active researchers: with only 46 days into 2017 (at the time when I write these words) they have already published at least 11 papers that display 2017 as the publication date [5 15]
Reaction Kinetics, Mechanisms and Catalysis