Herbert A Hauptman
Herbert Aaron Hauptman, New York, February 14, 1917 - Buffalo, October 23, 2011, was an American mathematician who was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Biography
Born in the modest Bronx neighborhood of New York, he was the eldest son of equally modest parents, Israel Hauptman, a printer, and Leah Rosenfeld, a saleswoman.
He was interested in science and mathematics from a young age. He graduated in 1937 from New York University (called & # 34; the Harvard of the proletariat & # 34;), and in 1939 he received a master's degree from Columbia University. After serving in World War II, he decided to follow the path of basic research, earning his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Maryland in 1954 with a thesis titled An n-Dimensional Euclidean Algorithm . In 1947 he had also enrolled in the PhD program in Philosophy at the same university, from which he would also receive the degree in 1954.
Scientific research
Since 1947, he collaborated with Jerome Karle (director of his doctoral thesis) at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. According to his own words, & # 34; our collaboration proved fruitful, since his training as a physicist-chemist, and mine as a mathematician, complemented each other very well & # 34;. Hauptman and Karle addressed the problem of developing direct methods for the determination of crystalline structures, obtaining the corresponding electron diffraction spectra using practical instruments of their own invention and using probabilistic methods for their interpretation, also called direct methods, also original. The basic lines of their research from these years were published by both in the monograph Solution of the Phase Problem I. The Centrosymmetric Crystal (1953, cf. 1955 recension)).
In 1970 he joined the research group of the Medical Foundation of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he is Professor of Biophysics. In 1972 he was appointed Director of Research at the same university. During those years he put forward different theories on molecular biology and chemical dynamics, which will be further developed during the following decades.
In 1985 he was awarded, along with his former teacher and collaborator Jerome Karle, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their extraordinary discoveries for the development of direct methods for determining crystalline structures.
Apart from this main award, he received numerous other awards (which he himself lists in his autobiography for the Nobel Prize), and was doctor honoris causa from different universities.
Despite his Jewish origins, in terms of religious convictions he declared himself an atheist on various occasions.