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Talk:Crystallography on stamps

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Re₂X₈

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I'm not sure that the The Soviet Union 1968 CPA 3661 stamp (Chemistry Institute and Dimetric Anion).jpg stamp has much to do with crystallography. It's showing a molecule or anion of dinuclear rhenium complex, or dimeric anion if you want (maybe octachlorodirhenate). Not dimetric, which however seems to be unrelated crystallography term. —Mykhal (talk) 15:18, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Mykhal: Thanks for your comment. Firstly you are correct about dimeric not dimetric: I used the word in the title of the image but it is incorrect. I will change it to dimeric in the article.
Secondly, one of the reasons the image was selected is that there only a few crystallography stamps available on Commons because of copyright restrictions on modern stamps by many countries. However this does not apply to Russian/Soviet stamps.
Thirdly, the explanation for using this specific image is as follows: "The first report on the Re2Cl82− structure and its short rhenium–rhenium bond appeared in a conference abstract by Russian scientists in 1961 (Koz’min PA, Kuznetsov VG (1961) Abstracts of All-union conference on crystal chemistry. Shtiints, Kishinev, pp 74–75). Then came, in 1964, the paper by Cotton and coworkers, in which, based on their X-ray structural study it was suggested for the first time that the extremely short distance between the two rhenium atoms is due to a quadruple metal–metal bond (Cotton FA, Curtis NF, Harris CB, Johnson BFG, Lippard SJ, Mague JT, Robinson WR, Wood JS (1964) Science 145:1305)." Source: Obituary, F. Albert Cotton (1930–2007). Struct. Chem. 18, 527–528 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11224-007-9201-y, Hargittai, M. (emphasis added)
Thus it was an x-ray crystallography study that first detected a metal-to-metal quadruple bond. The full story is given by F. Albert Cotton in Multiple Bonds Between Metal Atoms by F. Albert Cotton, Carlos A. Murillo and Richard A. Walton, 3rd edition, Springer, New York, 2005, pages 3-8, ISBN 0-387-22605-2 GreatStellatedDodecahedron (talk) 21:27, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]