Benton Seymour Rabinovitch was born to Rochelle (Schacter) and Samuel Rabinovitch, both immigrants to
Montreal, Canada. In spite of the financial difficulties resulting from the
Great Depression and anti-Jewish educational quotas, Benton Rabinovitch earned his
BSc from
McGill University in 1939, and his
PhD in 1942. He became a
full professor in 1957. Over four decades, Rabinovitch established himself as a leader in the field of
chemical dynamics. He and his students devised novel means to determine quantitative measurements of the efficiency of energy transfer between molecules in collisions: both gas-phase molecule–molecule collisions and collisions between molecules and solid surfaces. He established correlations between vibrational energy in molecules and rates of chemical reactions. He was the first researcher to experimentally validate important theories in physical chemistry such as the
Rice–Ramsperger–Kassel–Marcus (RRKM) theory. His experiments and the mathematical techniques that he developed have contributed to the understanding of
chemical kinetics,
molecular dynamics, and
gas-phase ion chemistry. From 1977–1985, Rabinovitch was the
editor of the
Annual Review of Physical Chemistry. He was also an editor for the
Journal of the American Chemical Society and served as Chair of the Division of Physical Chemistry for the
American Chemical Society. Following his formal retirement from academia, Rabinovitch retained academic status as
Professor Emeritus in 1986, and continued to scientific experimentation, writing and publishing. ==Silversmithing==