Nobel Prize Honors Kohn and Pople for Methods of Quantum Chemistry

DEC 01, 1998

Quantum mechanics tells you how to solve molecular structure, in principle. Kohn and Pople, in different ways, made it possible in practice.

DOI: 10.1063/1.882481

Barbara Goss Levi

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has chosen Walter Kohn and John Pople as the recipients of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Kohn, a research professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is being honored for “his development of density functional theory,” and Pople, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, is being cited for “his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.” Through their separate contributions, according to the academy, Kohn and Pople were “the two most prominent figures” in the “enormous theoretical and computational development” leading to the emergence of quantum chemistry.

This article is only available in PDF format