[3][4] Ivan worked as a school principal and a teacher of fine arts, politics and philosophy at the Tambov and Saratov gymnasiums.

[9][10] In 1889, a local librarian published an article in the Tobolsk newspaper where he claimed that Yakov was a baptized Teleut, an ethnic minority known as "white Kalmyks" at the time.

[14] This, however, contradicts the documented family chronicles, and neither of those legends is supported by Mendeleev's autobiography, his daughter's or his wife's memoirs.

[4][15][16] Yet some Western scholars still refer to Mendeleev's supposed "Mongol", "Tatar", "Tartarian" or simply "Asian" ancestry as a fact.

[17][18][19][20] Mendeleev was raised as an Orthodox Christian, his mother encouraging him to "patiently search divine and scientific truth".

At the age of 13, after the passing of his father and the destruction of his mother's factory by fire, Mendeleev attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk.

After becoming a teacher in 1867, Mendeleev wrote Principles of Chemistry (Russian: Основы химии, romanized: Osnovy khimii), which became the definitive textbook of its time.

[39][40] Mendeleev has the distinction of accurately predicting the properties of what he called ekasilicon, ekaaluminium and ekaboron (germanium, gallium and scandium, respectively).

Mendeleev questioned some of the currently accepted atomic weights (they could be measured only with a relatively low accuracy at that time), pointing out that they did not correspond to those suggested by his Periodic Law.

He was puzzled about where to put the known lanthanides, and predicted the existence of another row to the table which were the actinides which were some of the heaviest in atomic weight.

Some people dismissed Mendeleev for predicting that there would be more elements, but he was proven to be correct when Ga (gallium) and Ge (germanium) were found in 1875 and 1886 respectively, fitting perfectly into the two missing spaces.

[46][47][48] The original draft made by Mendeleev would be found years later and published under the name Tentative System of Elements.

[50] In 1876, he became obsessed[citation needed] with Anna Ivanova Popova and began courting her; in 1881 he proposed to her and threatened suicide if she refused.

Even after the divorce, Mendeleev was technically a bigamist; the Russian Orthodox Church required at least seven years before lawful remarriage.

His divorce and the surrounding controversy contributed to his failure to be admitted to the Russian Academy of Sciences (despite his international fame by that time).

He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1892,[1] and in 1893 he was appointed director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures, a post which he occupied until his death.

He is credited with a remark that burning petroleum as a fuel "would be akin to firing up a kitchen stove with bank notes".

Unexpectedly, at the full meeting of the academy, a dissenting member of the Nobel Committee, Peter Klason, proposed the candidacy of Henri Moissan whom he favored.

Svante Arrhenius, although not a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, had a great deal of influence in the academy and also pressed for the rejection of Mendeleev, arguing that the periodic system was too old to acknowledge its discovery in 1906.

Mendeleev devoted much study and made important contributions to the determination of the nature of such indefinite compounds as solutions.

In another department of physical chemistry, he investigated the expansion of liquids with heat, and devised a formula similar to Gay-Lussac's law of the uniformity of the expansion of gases, while in 1861 he anticipated Thomas Andrews' conception of the critical temperature of gases by defining the absolute boiling-point of a substance as the temperature at which cohesion and heat of vaporization become equal to zero and the liquid changes to vapor, irrespective of the pressure and volume.

"[61] Beginning in the 1870s, he published widely beyond chemistry, looking at aspects of Russian industry, and technical issues in agricultural productivity.

He explored demographic issues, sponsored studies of the Arctic Sea, tried to measure the efficacy of chemical fertilizers, and promoted the merchant navy.

[74] Mendelevium, which is a synthetic chemical element with the symbol Md (formerly Mv) and the atomic number 101, was named after Mendeleev.

It is a metallic radioactive transuranic element in the actinide series, usually synthesized by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles.

[76] A large lunar impact crater Mendeleev, that is located on the far side of the Moon, also bears the name of the scientist.