Miguel Ángel Catalán

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Miguel Ángel Catalán Sañudo (1894-1957) was a Spanish spectroscopist. Born in Zaragoza, he obtained his degree in chemistry from the University of Zaragoza and received in doctorate in Madrid in 1917. In 1920, he began work as a researcher at Imperial College London. Examining the spectrum of the arc of manganese, he determined that the optical spectra of complex atoms consisted of groups of lines –which he called "multipletes"- between which existed certain characteristic regularities. Catalán demonstrated that study of the multipletes led to further understanding of the states of energy of atomic electrons.

On the invitation of Arnold Sommerfeld, he worked at the University of Munich, and on the creation by the Rockefeller Foundation of the Institute of Physics and Chemistry (Madrid), in 1930 he was named head of the Spectroscopy Section. He was invited numerous times to work in the laboratories of the National Bureau of Standards (Washington, D.C.), University of Princeton, and MIT.

He published more than 70 scientific articles in specialized journals. In 1926, he received a prize from the Real Academia de Ciencias (Spain) and in 1930, the international Pelfort prize. From 1950 onwards, he served as director of the Departamento de Espectros del Instituto de Óptica de Madrid (C.S.I.C.). In 1952, he served as advisor to the Joint Commission for Spectroscopy, the head body for this field. In 1954, he became a member of the Real Academia de Ciencias (Madrid).

He died in Madrid.

The lunar crater Catalán is named after him.