Building Classes of Similar Chemical Elements from Binary Compounds and Their Stoichiometries

Similarity is one of the key concepts of the periodic table, which was historically addressed by assessing the resemblance of chemical elements through that of their compounds. A contemporary approach to the similarity among elements is through quantum chemistry, based on the resemblance of the electronic properties of the atoms involved. In spite of having two approaches, the historical one has been almost abandoned and the quantum chemical oversimplified to free atoms, which are of little interest for chemistry. Here we show that a mathematical and computational historical approach yields well-known chemical similarities of chemical elements when studied through binary compounds and their stoichiometries; these similarities are also in agreement with quantum chemistry results for bound atoms. The results come from the analysis of 4,700 binary compounds of 94 chemical elements through the definition of neighbourhoods for every element that were contrasted producing similarity classes. The method detected classes of elements with different patterns on the periodic table, e.g. vertical similarities as in the alkali metals, horizontal ones as in the 4th-row platinum metals and mixed similarities as in the actinoids with some transition metals. We anticipate the methodology here presented to be a starting point for more temporal and even more detailed studies of the periodic table.