User:FrankLambert/Frank Lambert

Frank L. Lambert graduated with honors from Harvard University and received the doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago. After military service and industrial research and development, he joined the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles. His primary concern was teaching and his most important publication in the field, that few professors seem to have read until recently, urged the abandonment of the traditional lecture system in chemistry. ("Why lecture -- since Gutenberg? Aren't textbooks available now?")

For many years he taught "Enfolding Entropy", a course for non-science majors. His research in the polarography of halogen compounds was designed for undergraduate collaboration and all but one of his scientific articles prior to his retirement were published with student co-authors.

Professor emeritus from Occidental College, he became the first scientific advisor to the J. Paul Getty Museum. He continued to be a consultant to the Getty Conservation Institute when it was founded and as it grew to have a staff of 14 scientists. In the last decade he has also been concerned with improving the teaching of thermodynamics to first-year university students and making the concepts more understandable to non-scientists as well.

His articles in the Journal of Chemical Education have resulted in the removal of misleading ideas (such as shuffled cards or messy dorm rooms being examples of entropy increase) from all but one US general chemistry text. As of April 2006, some 15 university chemistry textbooks have deleted the unscientific concept "entropy is disorder" from their thermodynamics chapters because of these publications by Professor Lambert.

His five Web sites (http://www.entropysite.com as the master site, with links, articles and supplements) emphasize the concepts surrounding the second law rather than equations and calculations. They had more than 510,000 readers (from some 2 million 'hits') in 2005.