The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 188 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.
The Bretton Woods agreement
The IMF was conceived in July 1944, when representatives of 45 countries meeting in the town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the northeastern United States, agreed on a framework for international economic cooperation, to be established after the Second World War. They believed that such a framework was necessary to avoid a repetition of the disastrous economic policies that had contributed to the Great Depression.
The IMF came into formal existence in December 1945, when its first 29 member countries signed its Articles of Agreement. It began operations on March 1, 1947. Later that year, France became the first country to borrow from the IMF.
The IMF's membership began to expand in the late 1950s and during the 1960s as many African countries became independent and applied for membership. But the Cold War limited the Fund's membership, with most countries in the Soviet sphere of influence not joining.
The Bretton Woods agreement
The IMF was conceived in July 1944, when representatives of 45 countries meeting in the town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the northeastern United States, agreed on a framework for international economic cooperation, to be established after the Second World War. They believed that such a framework was necessary to avoid a repetition of the disastrous economic policies that had contributed to the Great Depression.
The IMF came into formal existence in December 1945, when its first 29 member countries signed its Articles of Agreement. It began operations on March 1, 1947. Later that year, France became the first country to borrow from the IMF.
The IMF's membership began to expand in the late 1950s and during the 1960s as many African countries became independent and applied for membership. But the Cold War limited the Fund's membership, with most countries in the Soviet sphere of influence not joining.
Fast Facts on the IMF
- Membership: 188 countries
- Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
- Executive Board: 24 Directors representing countries or groups of countries
- Staff: Approximately 2,475 from 156 countries
- Total quotas: US$360 billion (as of 8/9/12)
- Additional pledged or committed resources: US$1 trillion
- Loans committed (as of 8/9/12): US$243 billion, of which US$186 billion have not been drawn (see table)
- Biggest borrowers (amount agreed as of 8/9/12): Greece, Portugal, Ireland
- Biggest precautionary loans (amount agreed as of 8/9/12): Mexico, Poland, Colombia
- Surveillance consultations: Consultations concluded for 128 countries in FY2011 and for 117 countries in FY2012
- Technical assistance: Field delivery in FY2011—198.2 person years
- Transparency: In 2011, about 90 percent of Article IV and program-related staff reports and policy papers were published
- Original aims: Article I of the Articles of Agreement sets out the IMF’s main goals:
- promoting international monetary cooperation;
- facilitating the expansion and balanced growth of international trade;
- promoting exchange stability;
- assisting in the establishment of a multilateral system of payments; and
- making resources available (with adequate safeguards) to members experiencing balance of payments difficulties
Arrhenius was born near Uppsala, Sweden. He presented his thesis, on the conductivities of electrolyte solutions, to the University of Uppsala in 1884. For the next five years he travelled extensively and visited a number of research centers in Europe. In 1895 he was appointed professor of physics at the newly formed University of Stockholm, serving its rector from 1897 to 1902. From 1905 until his death he was Director of physical chemistry at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm. He continued to work for many years on electrolytic solutions. In 1899 he discussed the temperature dependence of reaction rates on the basis of an equation, now usually known as Arrhenius equation. He worked in a variety of fields, and made important contributions to immunochemistry, cosmology, the origin of life, and the causes of ice age. He was the first to discuss the ‘green house effect’ calling by that name. He received Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903 for his theory of electrolytic dissociation and its use in the development of chemistry.
Faraday was born near London into a family of very limited means. At the age of 14 he was an apprentice to a kind bookbinder who allowed Faraday to read the books he was binding. Through a fortunate chance he became laboratory assistant to Davy, and during 1813-4, Faraday accompanied him to the Continent. During this trip he gained much from the experience of coming into contact with many of the leading scientists of the time. In 1825, he succeeded Davy as Director of the Royal Institution laboratories, and in 1833 he also became the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry. Faraday’s first important work was on analytical chemistry. After 1821 much of his work was on electricity and magnetism and different electromagnetic phenomena. His ideas have led to the establishment of modern field theory. He discovered his two laws of electrolysis in 1834. Faraday was a very modest and kind hearted person. He declined all honours and avoided scientific controversies. He preferred to work alone and never had any assistant. He disseminated science in a variety of ways including his Friday evening discourses, which he founded at the Royal Institution. He has been very famous for his Christmas lecture on the ‘Chemical History of a Candle’. He published nearly 450 scientific papers.
Peter Debye, the Dutch chemist received Nobel prize in 1936 for his work on X-ray diffraction and dipole moments. The magnitude of the dipole moment is given in Debye units in order to honour him.
Dmitri Mendeleev was born in Tobalsk, Siberia in Russia. After his father’s death, the family moved to St. Petersburg. He received his Master’s degree in Chemistry in 1856 and the doctoral degree in 1865. He taught at the University of St.Petersburg where he was appointed Professor of General Chemistry in 1867. Preliminary work for his great textbook “Principles of Chemistry” led Mendeleev to propose the Periodic Law and to construct his Periodic Table of elements. At that time, the structure of atom was unknown and Mendeleev’s idea to consider that the properties of the elements were in someway related to their atomic masses was a very imaginative one. To place certain elements into the correct group from the point of view of their chemical properties, Mendeleev reversed the order of some pairs of elements and asserted that their atomic masses were incorrect. Mendeleev also had the foresight to leave gaps in the Periodic Table for elements unknown at that time and predict their properties from the trends that he observed among the properties of related elements. Mendeleev’s predictions were proved to be astonishingly correct when these elements were discovered later.
Erwin Schr├╢dinger, an Austrian physicist received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Vienna in 1910. In 1927 Schr├╢dinger succeeded Max Planck at the University of Berlin at Planck’s request. In 1933, Schr├╢dinger left Berlin because of his opposition to Hitler and Nazi policies and returned to Austria in 1936. After the invasion of Austria by Germany, Schr├╢dinger was forcibly removed from his professorship. He then moved to Dublin, Ireland where he remained for seventeen years. Schr├╢dinger shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with P.A.M. Dirac in 1933.
Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976) received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich in 1923. He then spent a year working with Max Born at Gottingen and three years with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. He was professor of physics at the University of Leipzig from 1927 to 1941. During World War II, Heisenberg was in charge of German research on the atomic bomb. After the war he was named director of Max Planck Institute for physics in Gottingen. He was also accomplished mountain climber. Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.
Max Planck, a German physicist, received his Ph.D in theoretical physics from the University of Munich in 1879. In 1888, he was appointed Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Berlin. Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 for his quantum theory. Planck also made significant contributions in thermodynamics and other areas of physics.
Har Gobind Khorana, was born in 1922. He obtained his M.Sc. degree from Punjab University in Lahore. He worked with Professor Vladimir Prelog, who moulded Khorana’s thought and philosophy towards science, work and effort. After a brief stay in India in 1949, Khorana went back to England and worked with Professor G.W. Kenner and Professor A.R.Todd. It was at Cambridge, U.K. that he got interested in both proteins and nucleic acids. Dr Khorana shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1968 with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley for cracking the genetic code.
Victor Grignard had a strange start in academic life for a chemist - he took a maths degree. When he eventually switched to chemistry, it was not to the mathematical province of physical chemistry but to organic chemistry. While attempting to find an efficient catalyst for the process of methylation, he noted that Zn in diethyl ether had been used for this purpose and wondered whether the Mg/ether combination might be successful. Grignard reagents were first reported in 1900 and Grignard used this work for his doctoral thesis in 1901. In 1910, Grignard obtained a professorship at the University of Nancy and in 1912, he was awarded the Nobel prize for Chemistry which he shared with Paul Sabatier who had made advances in nickel catalysed hydrogenation.
Werner was born on December 12, 1866, in M├╝lhouse, a small community in the French province of Alsace. His study of chemistry began in Karlsruhe (Germany) and continued in Zurich (Switzerland), where in his doctoral thesis in 1890, he explained the difference in properties of certain nitrogen containing organic substances on the basis of isomerism. He extended vant Hoff’s theory of tetrahedral carbon atom and modified it for nitrogen. Werner showed optical and electrical differences between complex compounds based on physical measurements. In fact, Werner was the first to discover optical activity in certain coordination compounds.
Born on 5 July 1904, in Kempten, Germany, ERNST MAYR, the Harvard University evolutionary biologist who has been called ‘The Darwin of the 20th century’, was one of the 100 greatest scientists of all time. Mayr joined Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1953 and retired in 1975, assuming the title Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology Emeritus. Throughout his nearly 80-year career, his research spanned ornithology, taxonomy, zoogeography, evolution, systematics, and the history and philosophy of biology. He almost single-handedly made the origin of species diversity the central question of evolutionary biology that it is today. He also pioneered the currently accepted definition of a biological species. Mayr was awarded the three prizes widely regarded as the triple crown of biology: the Balzan Prize in 1983, the International Prize for Biology in 1994, and the Crafoord Prize in 1999. Mayr died at the age of 100 in the year 2004.
Temples often have some pillars portraying human figures playing musical instruments, but seldom do these pillars themselves produce music. At the Nellaiappar temple in Tamil Nadu, gentle taps on a cluster of pillars carved out of a single piece of rock produce the basic notes of Indian classical music, viz. Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, Sa. Vibrations of these pillars depend on elasticity of the stone used, its density and shape.
born in Vienna, Austria, worked on the kinetic theory of gases independently of Maxwell. A firm advocate of atomism, that is basic to kinetic theory, Boltzmann provided a statistical interpretation of the Second Law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy. He is regarded as one of the founders of classical statistical mechanics. The proportionality constant connecting energy and temperature in kinetic theory is known as Boltzmann’s constant in his honour.
He made a brilliant guess that equal volumes of gases have equal number of molecules at the same temperature and pressure. This helped in understanding the combination of different gases in a very simple way. It is now called Avogadro’s hypothesis (or law). He also suggested that the smallest constituent of gases like hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen are not atoms but diatomic molecules.
He was an English chemist. When different types of atoms combine, they obey certain simple laws. Dalton’s atomic theory explains these laws in a simple way. He also gave a theory of colour blindness.
Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) (1824-1907), born in Belfast, Ireland, is among the foremost British scientists of the nineteenth century. Thomson played a key role in the development of the law of conservation of energy suggested by the work of James Joule (1818-1889), Julius Mayer (1814- 1878) and Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894). He collaborated with Joule on the so-called Joule-Thomson effect : cooling of a gas when it expands into vacuum. He introduced the notion of the absolute zero of temperature and proposed the absolute temperature scale, now called the Kelvin scale in his honour. From the work of Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), Thomson arrived at a form of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thomson was a versatile physicist, with notable contributions to electromagnetic theory and hydrodynamics.
Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888), born in Poland, is generally regarded as the discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Based on the work of Carnot and Thomson, Clausius arrived at the important notion of entropy that led him to a fundamental version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that states that the entropy of an isolated system can never decrease. Clausius also worked on the kinetic theory of gases and obtained the first reliable estimates of molecular size, speed, mean free path, etc.