Aharon Katzir

Aharon Katzir was born in 1913 in Łódź

Aharon Katchalsky was born in Łódź, Poland, to Yehuda and Tsila Katchalsky. During World War I the family fled to Kyiv, where his younger brother Ephraim was born, and returned to Poland in 1920. In 1925 the family moved to the Land of Israel and settled in Jerusalem, where he studied at the Hebrew Gymnasium Rehavia.

He began studying at the Hebrew University in 1931 and married his classmate Rina Tiber. He co-wrote the first Hebrew guide to the butterflies of the Land of Israel with Shimon Fritz Bodenheimer. In 1939 he was in the first group to receive a doctorate from the Hebrew University.

In 1948 Chaim Weizmann invited him to the institute in Rehovot, where he founded the Department of Polymer Research and headed it until his death. His work on polyelectrolytes, thermodynamics and membranes led to the Kedem-Katchalsky equations, developed with his student Ora Kedem. He was the second president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 1962 to 1968.

From 1967 he also taught at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1971 he published The Crucible of Scientific Revolution, on science and society. He was murdered on May 30, 1972, in the terrorist attack at Lod Airport, and his brother Ephraim later became president of Israel.