Roald Hoffmann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1981) and author, playwright, poet, and essayist, will be in residence as a Montgomery Fellow from October 5 to October 16.
During his time on campus Professor Hoffmann will participate in three public events: first, a stage reading of Should’ve, his play dealing with the ethics of science, directed by Peter Hackett and performed on October 7 at 7:30 p.m. in the Bentley Theater of the Hopkins Center, which will be followed by a discussion between Dr. Hoffmann and the audience; second, a lecture entitled “Indigo: A Tale of Craft, Religion, History, Science and Culture,” co-sponsored by the Religion Department, which will take place on October 8 at 4:30 p.m. in Haldeman 041; and finally, a Montgomery Lecture on the subject of “Chemistry’s Essential Tension,” scheduled for Tuesday, October 13 at 4:30 p.m. in Filene Auditorium (Moore Hall). Dr. Hoffmann will also lead a Chemistry Department seminar on Thursday, October 8 from 10:30 to noon in 006 Steele.
“I love chemistry because it’s human in scale—infinitely complex but always tangible, always real,” Dr. Hoffmann told a New York Times interviewer. And this love has informed not only his scientific teaching and research in organic, inorganic, and solid state chemistry at Cornell where he has worked since 1965, but also his works of poetry (like Metamict State, Gaps and Verges, Soliton), his plays (Oxygen, Should’ve), and his books of philosophical meditations and essays dealing with the relationship of science to religion and with the magic of chemistry and its link to everyday life (Chemistry Imagined, The Same and Not The Same, Old Wines New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition). Whether as an applied theoretical chemist studying molecular orbital theory, the way electrons move in molecules, or as a poet lyrically describing the molecular deterioration of radioactive crystals, Dr. Hoffmann searches for the beauty inherent in natural phenomena. “Our problem,” he has observed, “is to see the beauty in complexity, in our lives and in nature. Beauty resides at some tense edge where simplicity and complexity, order and chaos, contend with each other.” Science and poetry are acts of creativity, and because they are “accomplished with craftsmanship, with an intensity, a concentration, a detachment, an economy of statement,” they share a common aesthetic goal: namely, the search to understand the underlying structure of the universe and to communicate its beauty through language or symbol or image.
Beauty as a concept or experience was far removed from the early years of Dr. Hoffmann’s life. He was just under four years old and living in Zloczów, in Poland (today, the Ukraine), when the Germans invaded the town. Over a period of three years he and his parents were moved to a ghetto, deported to a labor camp, and finally, after he and his mother had been smuggled out of the camp, forced into hiding for fifteen months in the cramped attic of a schoolhouse. The Nazis executed his father. Arriving in New York in 1949, Dr. Hoffmann eventually attended Columbia and Harvard, where he received his doctorate and was named to the Society of Fellows. It was here, at Harvard, working with Robert B. Woodward, that Dr. Hoffmann helped to develop what are today called the "Woodward-Hoffmann Rules.” These rules invoke the conservation of orbital symmetry to explain the stereochemical outcome of concerted reactions (i.e. the shape of a molecule can be predicted based upon the symmetry of the bonding molecular orbitals). It was a discovery that earned Dr. Hoffmann the Nobel Prize, and which Scientific American, in 1990, described as “the most important conceptual advance in theoretical organic chemistry.”
For more information contact:
Richard Stamelman
Executive Director, The Montgomery Endowment
Richard.H.Stamelman@Dartmouth.EDU
603-646-2400.
