“Between the ages of five”: Hoyle 1994, p. 42.

In 1939 he decided to forego: Hoyle wrote, “I discovered the Inland Revenue [the British equivalent of the IRS] distinguished between students and nonstudents by whether or not you had acquired the Ph.D.”; Hoyle 1994, p. 127.

“To achieve anything really worthwhile”: Hoyle 1994, p. 235. Hoyle added: “To hold popular opinion is cheap, costing nothing in reputation.”

“In 1926 it was possible”: Hoyle 1986b, p. 446.

Dmitry Mendeleyev, a Russian chemist: A number of other chemists came up with their own versions of the periodic table. The list included the French mineralogist Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois, John Newlands in England, and, in particular, Julius Lothar Meyer in Germany, who contributed similar tables (following some pioneering work by Robert Bunsen). Mendeleyev was the person, however, who managed to insert all sixty-two known elements into the table, and to not only predict elements awaiting discovery but also to even anticipate their densities and atomic weights. For a fascinating read on the periodic table, see Kean 2010.