Frank L. Lambert graduated with honors from Harvard University and received the doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago. After military service and industrial research and development, he joined the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles. His primary teaching responsibility was organic chemistry and his most important publication in the field, that few professors seem to have read until recently, urged the abandonment of the traditional lecture system. ("Why lecture -- since Gutenberg? Aren't textbooks available now?")
His research in the polarography of halogen compounds was designed for undergraduate collaboration and all but one of his scientific articles prior to his retirement were published with student co-authors.
Professor emeritus from Occidental College, he became the first scientific advisor to the J. Paul Getty Museum. He continued to be a consultant to the Getty Conservation Institute when it was founded and as it grew to have a staff of more than 14 scientists. In the last decade he has also been concerned with improving the teaching of thermodynamics to first-year university students and making the concepts more understandable to non-scientists as well.
His seven articles to 2010 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Chemical Education have resulted in the removal of misleading ideas (such as shuffled cards or messy dorm rooms being examples of entropy increase) from all but 3-4 of US general chemistry texts. As of January 2010, some 22 university chemistry textbooks have introduced his approach to entropy, totally discarding "disorder", and instead focusing on the spreading out or dispersal of energy in a process by the mobile energy-carrying molecules.
His five Web sites, with http://entropysite.oxy.edu as the master site (providing links, articles and supplements), emphasize the concepts fundamental to the second law rather than equations and calculations. They had more than 350,000 readers (from some 1.5 million 'hits') per year in 2006-2009 before they were transferred to the oxy.edu server.
Σ FrankLambert (talk) 20:13, 4 February 2010 (UTC)