"Help! I was hunting in the woods with my friend, and he suddenly dropped dead for no reason! Oh my God, I'm freaking out!!"
"Calm down, sir, we'll get you through this. The first thing we need to do is make sure that your friend really is dead."
"All right, hold on a second."
BLAM!
"Okay, now what?"
John A. PopleBorn 31 Oct 1925; died 15 Mar 2004 at age 78.British mathematician and chemist who shared (with Walter Kohn) the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on computational methodology to study the quantum mechanics of molecules, their properties and how they act together in chemical reactions. Using Schrödinger's fundamental laws of quantum mechanics, he developed a computer program which, when provided with particulars of a molecule or a chemical reaction, outputs a description of the properties of that molecule or how a chemical reaction may take place - often used to illustrate or explain the results of different kinds of experiment. Pople provided his GAUSSIAN computer program to researchers (first published in 1970). Further developed, it is now used by thousands of chemists the world over. |
