Vera Popova

Career

Bogdanovskaya returned to Saint Petersburg in 1892 to work at the Bestuzhev Courses, where she taught chemistry. This was an institution founded in 1878 to encourage Russian women to stay in Russia to study. She was working as an assistant to Prof. L'vov teaching the first courses in stereochemistry. Her reputation as a lecturer and her knowledge of teaching enabled her to write her first book, a textbook on basic chemistry. She wrote reviews, translated academic papers on chemistry and, together with her professor, published the works of Alexander Butlerov, who had died in 1886. Between 1891 and 1894, she published a number of papers based on her doctoral thesis.

She was not just a chemist; she was also interested in entomology, writing and languages. In 1889, she published a description of work with bees. Bogdanovskaya published her own short stories, as well as her translations of the French short-story writer Guy de Maupassant. She was 28.

Aftermath , the chemical that she was trying to synthesize at the time of her death, was not successfully created until 1961 from phosphine and carbon. It is extremely pyrophoric and polymerizes easily at temperatures above −120 °C. Its triple point is −124 °C and it burns spontaneously even at low temperatures when exposed to air. A shorter obituary appeared in the journal Nature and a brief notice in the American journal Science. One report by the chemist Vladimir Ipatieff suggested that she might have been poisoned by her experiment or have committed suicide, but this view was not supported by other reports.

Her early death led to a fund being created in her memory by her husband to assist female students. Her portrait was also displayed at the Women's College where she had trained.

Popova is credited with classifying dibenzyl ketone. This laid the foundation for synthetic acrylic resins created from acetone cyanohydrin.