Mendelevium's name honours Dmitri Mendeleev, whose periodic system, and whose confident predictions of undiscovered elements, had made the very map on which these new synthetic elements were being placed. Naming element 101 after him was a fitting tribute, but it was also, in the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, a pointed gesture, an American team choosing to honour a Russian scientist at a time of deep hostility between their nations. The experiment that found it was itself a landmark, demonstrating that chemistry could be done on single atoms, detected one by one as they decayed. Mendelevium has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a synthetic element of 1955; its distinction is to carry the name of the man whose great chart it, and every other element, now occupies.
The gesture was reportedly well received in the Soviet Union, where Mendeleev remained a revered national scientific figure, and it stands as one of the few moments of quiet scientific goodwill exchanged between the two Cold War rivals even as they separately raced, sometimes bitterly, to claim credit for the elements that followed. Berkeley and Dubna would nonetheless spend much of the following two decades locked in exactly the priority disputes that this earlier gesture might have seemed to promise against.