Frederick Dominic Rossini (July 18, 1899 – October 12, 1990) was an Americanthermodynamicist noted for his work inchemical thermodynamics.
In 1920, at the age of twenty-one, Rossini enteredCarnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and soon was awarded a full-time teaching scholarship. He graduated with a B.S. inchemical engineering in 1925, followed by an M.S. degree in science inphysical chemistry in 1926.
As a result of reading Lewis and Randall's classical 1923 textbookThermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances he wrote toGilbert N. Lewis and as a result he was offered a teaching fellowship at theUniversity of California at Berkeley. Among his teachers were Gilbert Lewis andWilliam Giauque. Rossini's doctoral dissertation on theheat capacities of strongelectrolytes in aqueous solution was supervised byMerle Randall. His Ph.D. degree was awarded in 1928, after only 21 months of graduate work, even though he continued to serve as a teaching fellow throughout this entire period. He worked at theNational Bureau of Standards (Washington, DC) from 1928 to 1950.
In 1932, Frederick Rossini, Edward W. Washburn, andMikkel Frandsen authored "The Calorimetric Determination of the Intrinsic Energy of Gases as a Function of the Pressure." This experiment resulted in the development of the Washburn Correction for bomb calorimetry, a decrease or correction of the results of a calorimetric procedure to normal states.
In 1950, he published his popular textbookChemical Thermodynamics.[1] In that year he also moved to theCarnegie Institute of Technology (Pittsburgh), where he remained until 1960. He served as dean of theNotre Dame College of Science from 1960 to 1967.
In 1973 Rossini spent the spring academic quarter at Baldwin-Wallace College, in Berea Ohio, as the first distinguished professor to occupy theCharles J. Strosacker Chair of Science.[2]
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