Hoffmann, Roald, << ROH ahl >> (1937-…), a Polish-born American chemist, used theories of physics to explain chemical reactions and chemical compounds. He described chemical processes in terms of the clouds of electrons in the atoms involved. Hoffman was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry, sharing the prize with Kenichi Fukui of Japan (see Fukui, Kenichi ).
Roald Hoffmann was born Roald Safran in Zloczow, Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine) on July 18, 1937. When he was a young child, that part of Poland was briefly under Russian occupation and then taken over by Nazi Germany. His family, being Jewish, was sent to a labor camp. Roald’s father smuggled out his wife and son, but was himself executed. Roald and his mother lived in hiding in a nearby village until their liberation by the Soviet Red Army in June 1944.
Roald’s mother later married an American named Paul Hoffman, and the family moved to the United States in 1949. Roald became a U.S. citizen in 1955 and took his stepfather’s name. Hoffmann gained his Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He made early use of computers to solve problems in organic chemistry (the chemistry of carbon-containing compounds). Hoffmann then spent a further three years at Harvard, where he worked with the distinguished organic chemist Robert Burns Woodward. When a certain chemical reaction involved in an attempt to synthesize vitamin B12 did not occur in the expected manner, Woodward and Hoffmann investigated further. They discovered new rules that helped to explain and predict the course of chemical reactions, now known as the Woodward-Hoffmann rules. These rules describe certain mathematical properties of the electron clouds that make up the outer parts of atoms. Hoffmann moved to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1965 and extended his work to inorganic molecules and to organometallics (organic molecules that include metal atoms).
Hoffmann has always regarded teaching at all levels as important. He was the presenter on an American television series “The World of Chemistry,” first broadcast in the United States in 1990. He is also a poet and, in 1996, became almost unique among professional scientists in taking up a literary professorship by becoming Frank M. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University. He began writing poetry in the mid-1970’s. The first of his collections to be published were The Metamict State (1987) and Gaps and Verges (1990). He also wrote Old Wine New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition (1997).
