Person: Pople, John Anthony
John Pople was an English theoretical chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998 for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Therefore, in the spring of 1936, when he was ten years old, John was sent to Bristol Grammar School.
- The first arrangement was for John to be a boarder at Bristol Grammar School during the week but return home by train each weekend.
- From about the age of twelve, Pople became fascinated by mathematics.
- When a new mathematics teacher came to Bristol Grammar School and started to stretch the pupils, Pople gave up his habit of making deliberate errors and showed his exceptional abilities.
- As a consequence Pople had to leave Cambridge in 1945 and take up employment.
- During 1947-48 Pople took courses on quantum mechanics, taught by Paul Dirac, fluid dynamics, cosmology and statistical mechanics, taught by Fred Hoyle.
- This did not work out so he next asked John Lennard-Jones who was giving a course on molecular orbital theory.
- In late 1947, Pople began to learn to play the piano.
- By the time of his marriage, Pople had won a Smith Prize, completed his doctoral thesis Lone Pair Electrons (1951) and become a fellow of Trinity (1951).
- Pople was appointed as a Lecturer in Mathematics at Cambridge in 1954, a position he held until 1958.
- During the years 1954 to 1958, Pople was teaching mathematics at Cambridge but undertaking research in mathematical applications to chemistry.
- Pople made his computational technics easily accessible to researchers by designing the GAUSSIAN computer program.
- We should fill in the remaining details of Pople's career.
- At Carnegie Mellon University he was named John Christian Warner University Professor of Natural Sciences and continued to hold this chair 1993.
- Pople received many honours for his remarkable achievements in addition to the Nobel Prize mentioned above.
Born 31 October 1925, Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, England. Died 15 March 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin England, Prize Nobel
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
