Hauptman, Herbert Aaron (1917-2011), an American theoretical chemist, shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in chemistry with his co-worker Jerome Karle (see Karle, Jerome ). Hauptman and Karle devised improved mathematical methods to determine the structure of a crystal from its effect on a beam of X rays.
Hauptman was born on Feb. 14, 1917, in New York City. He obtained an M.A. degree from Columbia University. In 1947, he became a researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., where he began a collaboration with Jerome Karle. The two men were working on the mathematics of X-ray crystallography. In this technique, a beam of X rays is fired at a crystalline material. The X rays are scattered from the rows of regularly spaced atoms in the crystal and captured by a photographic film. Scattered rays reinforce each other if their waves are “in step,” or cancel each other out if they are “out of step.” The spacing of the atoms and the angle of the scattering produce a pattern of bright and dark spots. The structure of the crystal may then be deduced by mathematical analysis. Hauptman and Karle tackled a particularly difficult part of the analysis. The combination of Karle’s skills in physical chemistry and Hauptman’s ability in mathematics enabled them to develop new methods in crystallographic analysis. For this work, Hauptman gained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland in 1955.
Hauptman continued to work with Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory until 1970, when he became professor of biophysics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The same year, he joined a crystallographic research group at the Medical Foundation of Buffalo (MFB), New York, becoming its vice president and director in 1972 and its president in 1988. In 1994, the name of the MFB was changed to the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, partly in recognition of Hauptman’s contributions. Hauptman died on Oct. 23, 2011.
