Arthur Amos Noyes

Arthur Amos Noyes was an American chemist, inventor and educator, born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on 13 September 1866, the son of Amos Noyes and Anna Page Noyes. He received a PhD in 1890 from Leipzig University under the guidance of Wilhelm Ostwald. He served as acting president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1907 and 1909 and as professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology from 1919 to 1936, and he was a major influence on the educational philosophy of the core curriculum at Caltech and on the negotiations that created the National Research Council with George Ellery Hale and Robert Millikan. With Willis Rodney Whitney he formulated the Noyes and Whitney equation in 1897, which relates the rate of dissolution of solids to the properties of the solid and the dissolution medium and is important in pharmaceutical science. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and he died on 3 June 1936.