Analytically Speaking Podcast

Welcome to “Analytically Speaking,” the podcast from LCGC International and Spectroscopy. Here in Episode #47, podcast host Dr. Jerry Workman speaks with Dr. Thomas Mayerhöfer from the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT) in Jena, Germany, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, about “the other half” of the Beer–Lambert law: dispersion theory, the concentration law of the refractive index, and refractive-index and complex-valued chemometrics. Dr. Mayerhöfer, who first joined the podcast for Episode #29 on the history and theory of infrared spectroscopy, returns to explain how Beer’s law falls out of dispersion theory as a limiting case, why the refractive index obeys a concentration law of its own that was mainstream physical chemistry before about 1920 (and helped confirm the Kekulé structure of benzene), and how new refractive-index and complex-valued chemometric methods — in combination with PLS — can outperform conventional absorbance-based calibration by up to an order of magnitude.

In this Icons of Spectroscopy article, Executive Editor Jerome Workman Jr. delves into the life and impact of Bruce Kowalski, an analytical chemist whose major contributions to chemometrics helped establish the field of applying advanced quantitative and qualitative mathematics to extract meaningful chemical information from complex datasets. Kowalski’s visionary approach to chemical data analysis, education, and software development has transformed the landscape of modern analytical chemistry for academia and industry.