Introduction on Special Issue: Ionic Liquids

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One may ask what is the reason for this special issue of the Journal of Solution Chemistry being dedicated both to the fashionable topic of ionic liquids and to the memory of Prof. Eduard Hala. A prominent personality and internationally renowned thermodynamicist, Prof. Hala is the author of more than 50 original papers and, more importantly, of two seminal and timeless monographs [1, 2]. In the early 1960s, while he was still a young pedagogue at the Institute of Chemical Technology Prague, he wrote with his faculty colleague and longtime friend Arnost Reiser the first modern Czech textbook of physical chemistry that was inspired by similar university textbooks published in English. Later, he summarized his deep knowledge in a book entitled Vapor–Liquid Equilibria, which is commonly called ‘‘a chemical engineer’s cookbook’’. Shortly after its publication in Czech, Vapor–Liquid Equilibria was translated into English and published by Pergamon Press. Since then this publication has become compulsory reading material of every thermodynamicist and engineer dealing with distillation processes. Prof. Hala was also among the first in Czechoslovakia to have grasped the importance of computer programming in science and later of the increasing significance of statistical thermodynamics. As an outstanding university educator and co-founder with Prof. Reiser of the so-called Prague School of Physical Chemistry, Prof. Hala is therefore worth remembering time and time again. Prof. Hala passed away in 1989 and even though ionic liquids were already a known class of compounds at that time, a pronounced interest in their properties and applications only started to show itself in the early 1990s. However, Prof. Hala was known throughout