John Anthony Pople
Pople, John Anthony (1925-2004) was a British theoretical chemist who pioneered the use of computers for predicting the behavior of molecules in chemical reactions. He won the 1998 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry. Quantum chemistry analyzes the distribution of electrons (negatively charged particles) in molecules and interprets the chemical behavior of molecules in terms of their electron structure. He shared the prize with Austrian-born American chemist, Walter Kohn.
Pople was born on Oct. 31, 1925, in Burnhamon-Sea, Somerset, in southwest England. His father, Keith Pople, owned a clothing store and his mother, Mary Jones Pople, worked as a tutor and librarian. He entered Cambridge University, England, on a scholarship award in 1943. After obtaining his Ph.D. degree in mathematics there in 1951, he took a mathematics teaching position at Cambridge. In 1958, he accepted a position as superintendent of the new Basics Physics Division at the National Physical Laboratory near London. In 1964, he became professor of chemical physics at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1993, he became professor of chemistry at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Pople made major advances in adapting mathematics and physics to the study of chemistry. He based his work on quantum mechanics, a theory that explains the behavior of molecules in terms of the motions and energies of electrons. Scientists use the theory to predict what will happen in chemical reactions. But because vast numbers of electrons may be involved in the reactions, the equations become too complicated to solve by traditional methods. In 1970, Pople developed a computer program called Gaussian, that could quickly predict how different molecules would interact. The program became a standard scientific tool, with uses in such areas as university research, chemical engineering, medicine, and the development of new drugs.