The Laureates have each made pioneering contributions in developing methods that can be used for theoretical studies of the properties of molecules and the chemical processes in which they are involved.
Citation:
"to Walter Kohn for his development of the density-functional theory and to John Pople for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry."
Walter Kohn was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1923. He was a professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, USA between 1950 and 1960 and at the University of California in San Diego from 1960 to 1979. He was Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, where he is still active, from 1979-1984.
John A. Pople was born in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, U.K. in 1925. British citizen. He became Ph.D. in Mathematics at Cambridge, U.K., in 1951. In 1964 he became Professor of Chemical Physics at CarnegieMlon University, Pittsburgh, USA and subsequently Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, USA, in 1986, where he is still active.
Work Summary
For several decades they have been developed and refined so that it
is now possible to analyze the structure and properties of matter in detail.
Conventional calculation of the properties of molecules is based
on a description of the motion of individual electrons. For this reason,
such methods are mathematically very complicated. Walter Kohn showed that
it is not necessary to consider the motion of each individual electron:
it suffices to know the average number of electrons located at any one
point in space. This has led to a computationally simpler method, the density-functional
theory.
The simplicity of the method makes it possible to study very large
molecules. Today, for example, calculations can be used to explain how
enzymatic reactions occur. It has taken more than thirty years for a large
number of researchers to render these calculations practicable, and the
method is now one of the most widely used in quantum chemistry.
John Pople is rewarded for developing computational methods making possible
the theoretical study of molecules, their properties and how they
act together in chemical reactions. These methods are based on the fundamental
laws of quantum mechanics as defined by, among others, the physicist E.
Schrödinger. A computer is fed with particulars of a molecule or a
chemical reaction and the output is a description of the properties of
that molecule or how a chemical reaction may take place. The result is
often used to illustrate or explain the results of different kinds of experiment.
Pople made his computational technics easily accessible to researchers
by designing the GAUSSIAN
computer program. The first version was published in 1970. The program
has since been developed and is now used by thousands of chemists in universities
and commercial companies the world over.