John pople

John Anthony Pople (Burnham-on-Sea, October 31, 1925 - March 15, 2004), was an English chemist and mathematician who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998.

Biography

He lived until after World War II in Somerset. From the age of twelve he became interested in mathematics. He entered Cambridge University on scholarship in 1943, where he graduated in mathematics in 1946 and received his doctorate in chemistry in 1951.

He moved to the United States in the 1960s where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1961 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and in 2003 he was made Sir by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

Finally, John passed away on March 15, 2004 at his residence in Sarasota, located in the US state of Florida.

Scientific research

His first contribution was a theory of the approximate calculations of molecular orbitals on pi bond systems in 1953. This theory was identical to the one developed by Rudolph Pariser and Robert Parr in the same year, which is why it was called the Pariser method -Parr-Pople.

Interested in quantum chemistry, he developed methods of quantum computing, on which he based the Gaussian computer program. Through this type of method he developed the so-called computational chemistry, which allows to investigate the properties of molecules in chemical processes.

In 1998 he was awarded half the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of computational methods of quantum chemistry. The other half of the prize went to the American physicist Walter Kohn for the development of the density functional theory.