Richard Edmund Stanton

Richard Edmund Stanton, an outstanding example of a creative scientist and dedicated educator at an undergraduate institution, passed away on 23 August 2023 in Buffalo, New York, eight days before his 92nd birthday.

He was a popular, but demanding, chemistry professor at Canisius College in Buffalo. For 38 years every chemistry major took his physical chemistry course. When he was on sabbatical leave, third-year students rescheduled the course to take it in their senior year when Stanton returned. The students once took a huge clock from the athletic center and mounted it at the back of his lecture room in full view of the lecturer as a humorous complaint about his lectures running over time. Stanton generously devoted his time to assure a quality education for Canisius students. He developed physical chemistry laboratory experiments, supervised the laboratory, and taught an advanced quantum chemistry course, grading exams, homework, and lab reports without the aid of graduate student assistants. He served as department chair for four years, all while publishing regularly in the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry and the AIP Journal of Chemical Physics, mainly in the field of molecular electronic structure theory.

In 1961 Stanton proved that the Hartree–Fock wavefunction satisfies the Hellmann–Feynman theorem, a result independently derived by George G. Hall in Britain about the same time. The Hartree–Fock energy lies above the true nonrelativistic energy by the correlation energy correction. Stanton contributed to active research efforts in the 1960s to calculate the correlation energy by variation perturbation theory. His 1965 paper clarified and made minor corrections to the current analysis in the literature and established an exact relationship between first-order pair correlation functions and higher-order unlinked clusters.

Stanton is credited as the originator in 1983 of the concept of kinetic balance in relativistic quantum theory. For nearly all atoms and molecules, the nonrelativistic Hamiltonian operator has eigenvalues well below the physical ground-state energy, all having eigenfunctions with symmetries other than the antisymmetric irreducible representation of the group of electron permutations. Variational computations are saved from collapsing into these low-lying nonphysical states by requiring the trial function to be antisymmetric. Similarly, kinetic balance saves variational Dirac computations from collapsing into low-lying antiparticle states.

Stanton met and married fellow graduate student Mary Zappia at Notre Dame. Upon graduating in 1957 with a degree in theoretical chemistry, he accepted the faculty position at Canisius that he held until retiring in 1996. Richard and Mary raised a loving family of three boys and two girls. They traveled together to Ireland and England in 1969–70, exploring their Irish heritage with the benefit of an unrestricted Alfred P. Sloan Foundation research fellowship. He was chosen as an Outstanding Educator of America in 1973.

Stanton was fond of dogs, an avid golfer and gardener, and a loyal fan of the Buffalo Bills. While driving home from Bills games, we would invariably discuss the linebackers and pass receivers but often drifted off the subject. A personal letter from Stanton in 2009 opened with a wish to elaborate on the discussion we had while driving home from the Bills–Houston Texans game. The three-page letter continued with a detailed account of his derivation of Maxwell’s equations.

Stanton will be remembered for his scholarship, modesty, generosity, and good humor.

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