Bohrium honours Niels Bohr, whose model of the atom, with its electrons arranged in shells, underlies the very structure of the periodic table and explains why the elements recur in families as they do. The name was originally proposed as nielsbohrium, partly to distinguish it in the tangle of the naming disputes, before being shortened to the standard bohrium.
There is a fitting logic in giving Bohr's name to a superheavy element, since it was his atomic theory that let chemists predict where such elements should sit and how they might behave. Bohrium has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a synthetic element of the 1980s; its interest lies in honouring one of the architects of the quantum atom, and in the extraordinary experimental feat of making and identifying a few atoms of an element that endures for only a fraction of a second.
The institute Bohr founded in Copenhagen, now called the Niels Bohr Institute, became one of the great meeting places of early twentieth-century physics, training or hosting a remarkable number of future Nobel laureates and shaping the development of quantum mechanics as thoroughly as any single institution in the field's history. Bohr also fled Nazi-occupied Denmark for Sweden and then the United States during the Second World War, later contributing to the Manhattan Project before returning home once the occupation ended.