Call Number:

008.2004.028

Repository:

Science History Institute Archives

Extent:

21 linear feet (49 boxes)

Preferred Citation:

Papers of Sir John A. Pople, Science History Institute Archives Philadelphia, Pennsylvania..

Date:

1930-2004 (inclusive) and 1965-2000 (bulk)

Creator:

Frisch, Michael J., Gill, Peter M. W., Head-Gordon, Martin, Curtiss, L. A. (Larry A.), Raghavachari, R., Hehre, Warren, and Argonne National Laboratory

Form:

Archival materials

Abstract:

Sir John A. Pople was born in Burnham-on-Sea in England on October 31, 1925. He was educated Cambridge University studying under Sir J.E. Lennard-Jones and Charles A.Coulson receiving his doctorate in 1951. At the urging of fellow quantum chemist Robert Parr he emigrated to the U.S. in 1964 taking up a teaching position at Carnegie-Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, PA. Pople excelled at mathematics and his contributions to what came to be known as the Pariser-Parr-Pople (PPP) method made him a rising star in the field of computational chemistry. His increasing interest in the use of computers to further theoretical inquiries led to his co-authoring a predictive program known as Gaussian 70. Pople's work in this and successive versions of the Gaussian program were cited upon his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1998 an honor he shared with Walter Kohn creator of the density functional theory (DFT). For his contributions to chemistry Pople was knighted in 2003. He died in Chicago, IL on March 15, 2004.

For a more detailed inventory, please view this record in our library catalog: https://othmerlib.sciencehistory.org/record=b1050222~S6

The collection covers most of the highpoints of Pople's post 1964 career in the U.S. There is an almost-complete run of reprints of his published articles, computational notebooks and examples of the source codes used in the Gaussian and Q-Chem computational programs.