About
Roald Hoffmann, born in 1937 in Złoczów, Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), is an American chemist of Polish-Jewish origin. A Holocaust survivor, he emigrated to the United States in 1949. He earned his PhD in chemical physics from Harvard in 1962. A professor at Cornell, he developed the Woodward-Hoffmann rules with R.B. Woodward (1965) and the extended Hückel method. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenichi Fukui. Hoffmann is also a poet and playwright, publishing poetry collections and co-writing the play Oxygen.
* 1937-07-18
Major works
- The Metamict State (1987)poetry collection
- Gaps and Verges (1990)poetry collection
- Oxygenplay
Key milestones
- 1965Develops the Woodward-Hoffmann rules with R.B. Woodward.
- 1981Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenichi Fukui.
- 1984Elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society.
Themes
Theoretical chemistryOrbital symmetryScientific poetryHolocaust and survivalNature of scientific discovery
Sources: nobelprize.org · royalsociety.org · sciencehistory.org