Roald Hoffmann

Roald Hoffmann was born on 18 July 1937, at Zloczów, in Poland in a Jewish family. His mother, Clara (Rosen), was a teacher and his father, Hillel Safran, was a civil engineer.

With the German invasion of Poland, his family was forced to go to a labour camp. Hoffmann, his mother, two uncles, and an aunt were able to escape from the camp by bribing the guards. The family spent eighteen months, from January 1943 to June 1944, by hiding in the attic and a storeroom of the local schoolhouse.

His father remained at the labour camp and was eventually killed by the Germans. His mother later remarried and his stepfather’s name was Paul Hoffmann.

In 1946, Hoffmann’s family shifted to Czechoslovakia from Poland. From there they travelled across Austria, Germany and Munchen finally migrating to the United States of America in 1949.

In 1955, he completed his high school education from Stuyvesant High School in New York. He was the recipient of the Westinghouse science scholarship. He subsequently enrolled into the Columbia University and received his B.A., summa cum laude, majoring in chemistry in 1958.

He conducted extensive studies utilizing qualitative, hypothetical, pragmatic and computational methods to understand the electronic structure of stable as well as unstable molecules along with the changes in states during reactions.

Beginning in 1963, he developed the extended Hückel method, a partly empirical quantum chemistry method. It was based on the Hückel molecular orbital method proposed by Erich Hückel in 1930. The extended method could be used to determine molecular orbitals and the relative energy of various geometric configurations.

In 1965, he along with organic chemist Robert Burns Woodward formulated a set of rules in organic chemistry, forecasting the barrier heights of pericyclic reactions based on the conservation of organic symmetry.

Initially developed to understand the stereospecificity of electrocyclic reactions in controlled thermal and photochemical conditions, the rules can be used to understand sigmatropic reactions, group transfer reactions, electrocyclic reactions and cycloadditions.

In 1965, he was appointed as Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry at Cornell University. He became Professor in 1968 and in 1974 was made the John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science.

Roald Hoffmann is a theoretical chemist whose most notable works include the development of the extended Hückel method to study molecular orbitals and the ‘Woodward–Hoffmann’ rules in organic chemistry.