Abstract: For organic chemist and chemistry historian Jeffrey I. Seeman, questions are like seeds. Once one is planted in his mind, it tends to flourish, leading him to ask many more questions and publish a multitude of related research papers. In his latest publication, Seeman, a scholar at the University of Richmond, explores how the kernel of an idea blossoms into Nobel Prize-winning work. The paper, which totals more than three dozen pages in the Journal of Organic Chemistry, examines the time period from May 5, 1964, to Nov. 25, 1964, when organic chemist Robert Burns Woodward and theoretical chemist Roald Hoffmann began their famous collaboration (2015, DOI: 10.1021/acs.joc.5b01792). During this time, the pair wrote their first paper on what would eventually become the Woodward-Hoffmann rules, which predict the outcome of certain reactions based on molecular orbital symmetry. The landmark theoretical work earned Hoffmann a share of the 1981 Nobel Prize
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-11
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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