History of science and technology in Japan
History of science and technology in Japan
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History of science and technology in Japan

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History of science and technology in Japan

This article is about the history of science and technology in modern Japan.

In the natural sciences, the number of Japanese winners of the Nobel Prize has been second only to the United States in the 21st century, for contributions made in the 20th century. On the list of countries by research and development spending, Japan is third on the list, behind the United States and China.

In 1952, Kenichi Fukui published a paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics titled "A molecular theory of reactivity in aromatic hydrocarbons." He later received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his investigations into the mechanisms of chemical reactions, with his prize-winning work focused on the role of frontier orbitals in chemical reactions, specifically that molecules share loosely bonded electrons which occupy the frontier orbitals, that is the Highest Occupied Molecular Orbital (HOMO) and the Lowest Unoccupied Molecular Orbital (LUMO).

Ryōji Noyori was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his "work on chirally catalyzed hydrogenation reactions" in 1968.

In the 1960s and 1970s, green fluorescent proteins (GFP), along with the separate luminescent protein aequorin (an enzyme that catalyzes the breakdown of luciferin, releasing light), was first purified from Aequorea victoria and its properties studied by Osamu Shimomura. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP".

Koichi Tanaka was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of soft laser desorption, "methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules" and for "soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules". In 1987, he demonstrated that laser pulses could blast apart large protein molecules so that ions in gaseous form are produced.

Hideki Shirakawa was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the discovery and development of conductive polymers".

In the 1930s, while studying switching circuits, NEC engineer Akira Nakashima independently discovered Boolean algebra, which he was unaware of until 1938. In a series of papers published from 1934 to 1936, he formulated a two-valued Boolean algebra as a way to analyze and design circuits by algebraic means in terms of logic gates.

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