John Pople

Born on 31 October 1925 in Burnham-on-Sea, England, John Pople was a mathematician and Nobel laureate known for his contributions to computational chemistry. Pople studied mathematics at Cambridge University, where he received his PhD in 1951. After working at Cambridge and the National Physical Laboratory, Pople immigrated in 1964 to the US, where pursued an interest in chemical research. Although he had never taken a university-level chemistry course, he was offered an appointment as professor of chemical physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). Pople is best known for calculating the electronic structures of molecules and their behavior in chemical reactions, for which he designed a computer software package, Gaussian, to perform the required calculations. That tool has been used worldwide by both academicians and commercial companies for testing new drugs, probing the molecular composition of interstellar matter, and studying the effects of atmospheric pollutants. It was for this work that Pople was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1993 he moved to Evanston and was appointed Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, a position he held until his death in 2004 . In addition to the Nobel, Pople received the 1992 Wolf Prize in Chemistry and many other awards. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1961 and knighted in 2003. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 31 October 1925