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Michael Polanyi (born Polányi Mihály) (March 11, 1891, Budapest – February 22, 1976) was a Hungarian–British polymath whose thought and work extended across physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Michael was born into a Jewish family. His older brother Karl is known as an economist. Their father was an engineer and entrepreneur whose volatile fortunes building railways perhaps encouraged Polanyi to seek a career in medicine. He graduated in 1913, and shortly afterwards served as a physician in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, but was hospitalized. During his convalescence he wrote what in 1917 became a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Budapest (supervised by Gusztáv Buchböck). In 1920, he emigrated to Germany, eventually ending up as a research chemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fiber Chemistry in Berlin. There, he married Magda Elizabeth in a Roman Catholic ceremony. In 1929, Magda gave birth to a son John, who went on to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry. With the coming to power in 1933 of the Nazi party, Polanyi accepted the offer of a chair in Physical Chemistry at the University of Manchester. Because his interests later shifted from chemistry to economics and philosophy, Manchester created a new chair in Social Science (1948-58) for him. Polanyi's scientific interests were diverse, embracing chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and the adsorption of gases at solid surfaces.
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