An essay on manganese, by Joan Selverstone Valentine

Abstract

My first impression of manganese was decidedly negative, the result of an unfortunate encounter with a table of reduction potentials in high school. To my eye, that table contained a bizarre array of manganese compounds with no apparent logic to their oxidation states or to the number of oxide ions that each contained. How was a naive student to make sense of the fact that the oxidation states of manganese vary so widely, from +7 to +2?

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