Life story
Dionýz Ilkovič was born in Šarišský Štiavnik. He completed his university studies in Prague, where his interests focused on chemistry and physics. He became a research assistant to Jaroslav Heyrovský at Charles University and under his guidance prepared a dissertation on the mercury drop cathode.
His name is borne by Ilkovič's equation, which in polarography describes the dependence of diffusion current on several quantities. Heyrovský, a later Nobel Prize laureate, referred to it in his Nobel lecture as the most precise electrochemical law since the time of Faraday.
From autumn 1939 he worked in Bratislava at the Slovak University of Technology, where in 1943 he was appointed full professor of physics. After the war, he played a key role in the development of physical research in Slovakia: from the commission he headed, first the Physics Cabinet of the Slovak Academy of Sciences emerged, then a laboratory, and from 1963 the Institute of Physics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
He wrote the first Slovak university physics textbook — between 1957 and 1971 it was published in five editions with a print run of forty thousand copies. He died in Bratislava in August 1980.
Constellation of Life
Important milestones that shaped their journey.