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Authorised form of namePople; Sir; John Anthony (1925 - 2004)
Dates1925 - 2004
Place of birthBurnham-on-Sea, Somerset
Date of birth31/10/1925
Date of death15/03/2004
OccupationMathematician; Quantum Chemist; 'The English father of computational chemistry', pioneereed the use of computers to model the behaviour of atoms and molecules.
ActivityEducation:
State scholarship to Bristol Grammar School; Trinity College Cambridge (1943-1945, 1947-1951 where he was taught by Paul Dirac, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics)
Career:
A theoretical mathematician who abondoned the study of chemistry at the age of 15, he also developed mahny of the algorithms which made computational chemistry possible, developing one of the first programmes, Gaussian, which, despite developing it and making it famous, the current owners of the programme banned him, and other reserchers, from using it in his last decade.
Bristol Aeroplane Company; Research Fellow, Lecturer, Trinity College, Cambridge (1954-1958); National Research Council, Ottawa, Canada (Summer 1956 and Summer 1957); Head of Basic Physics division, National Physical Laboratory (1958-1964); sabbatical year in USA; Professor of Chemical Physics, Carnegie Insitute of Technology, Pittsburgh known from 1967 as Carnegie Mellon University (1964-1993); Professor,Northwestern University (1986), full member of faculty (1993); Marlow Medal of the Faraday Society(1958); Irving Langmuir Award (1970); Harrrison Howe Award (1971); Gilbert Nerton Lewis Award (1977); Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1971); Corresponding Member of Australian Academy of Sciences (1993)
Medals and prizes:
Nobel Prize (Chemistry) 1998
Honours:
KBE 2003
Membership categoryFellow
Date of election16/03/1961
Age at election35
RSActivityMedals and prizes:
Davy Medal 1988; Copley Medal 2002
RelationshipsMarried (1952) Joy Bowers
SourceObituaries:
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 2006 vol 52 pp 299-314, plate, by A D Buckingham
Obituaries in The Guardian (19 March 2004); The Telegraph (19 March 2004), The Times (24 March 2004)
Virtual International Authority Filehttp://viaf.org/viaf/165426241
CodeNA4670
Archives associated with this Fellow
RefNoTitleDate
IM/GA/WRS/8853Pople, John Anthonynd
RR/72/220Referee's report by Meredith Gwynne Evans, on a paper 'The molecular orbital theory of chemical valency. V. The structure of water and similar molecules' by John Anthony Pople1949
RR/72/179Referee's report by Meredith Gwynne Evans, on a paper 'The molecular orbital theory of chemical valency. IV. The significance of equivalent orbitals' by John Edward Lennard-Jones and John Anthony Pople1949
EC/1961/21Pople, John Anthony: certificate of election to the Royal Society16 March 1961
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