“Much like if I look at a map of the United States, and I’m in Maine, I can tell that the temperatures there are going to be lower than if I were in Florida,” Gregory Girolami said in a joint interview with his wife, Vera Mainz. Both are inorganic chemists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Together with Carmen Giunta, a chemist at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, they organized a 150th anniversary symposium, held this week during the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in San Diego.

“If you tell me an element is in a certain place,” Dr. Girolami said, “I can tell you lots of things about it — whether it’s a metal or not, whether it is abundant on earth or not — simply by noting its location in the periodic table.”

Dr. Mainz added, “If you want to communicate with an alien race, put up a periodic table, because that arrangement is universal no matter where you are.”

The Internet Database of Periodic Tables lists more than 1,000 versions, including a table of elemental scarcity, as well as cupcake, clock, Lego and haiku variations, as well as some more technical adaptations. The mathematician and musician Tom Lehrer set it to music (by Gilbert and Sullivan), and the Italian chemist, writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi used it as the basis for an idiosyncratic memoir (“The Periodic Table”).

“Many people seem to believe that there is only one true periodic table, either that exists or is waiting to be discovered, and they go to great lengths to debate the validity of the different types,” said Dr. Poliakoff, who is a YouTube personality with the Periodic Videos series, produced by Brady Haran. (At the A.C.S. meeting, Dr. Poliakoff received an award honoring his work interpreting chemistry for the general public.) “My feeling is that most types are equally valid and it just depends what you are trying to show.”