On the occasion of the Optics and Optoelectronics 2007 Congress (16-19 April 2007) Professor Theodor Hänsch, Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics in 2005, visited the PALS laboratory (see A decade of PALS) and received De Scientia et Humanitate Optime Meritis Medal. The founder of laser spectrometry and laser frequency comb techniques, which could lead to a detection of gravitational waves as well as holographic television, have been working on laser atomic clock as well as a laser spectrometry of hydrogen atom during last decade. and Lenka Kovaříková.
He began his university career as assistant to Professor B. Brauner in the Institute of Analytical Chemistry of Prague’s Charles University. He became the first Professor of Physical Chemistry at this University in 1926. Heyrovsky’s invention of the polarographic method dates from 1922 and he concentrated his further scientific activity on the development of this new branch of electrochemistry. The instrument designed for recording polarization curves was called a polarograph and from that the new method got the name polarography. In 1950, he was appointed director of the newly established Polarographic Institute which was incorporated into the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences from 1952 to 1992 and since then into the AS CR. and Květa Stejskalová.