AROUND THE QUADS
Roald Hoffman '58 Lights Up Chemistry Department
By Timothy P. Cross

Roald Hoffman '58 (left) with Dean Austin Quigley. PHOTO: JOE PINEIRO

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Even the most inventive speakers routinely begin lectures in familiar ways: with anecdotes or especially telling quotations. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman '58 began the 14th annual Department of Chemistry lecture on May 2 by igniting a balloon filled with hydrogen.

Hoffman's pyrotechnics display introduced his talk on the "art, craft and business" of chemistry. While a traditional view (dating back to Renaissance alchemists) looked at chemistry in terms of substances, since the 18th century, Hoffman noted, it has been the study and transformation of molecules that have been at the heart of chemical research.

"Molecules are structures," he says, and "certain architectonic principles apply." But aesthetics also plays a role in Hoffman's understanding of molecules, which he describes as "simply beautiful, beautifully simple and devilishly hard to make." And making is crucial, he says, for people can forget that "chemistry is involved with creation as well as discovery."

Hoffman's ability to wax both philosophical and chemical reflects his unique background. Born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland, Hoffman moved to the United States in 1949. He attended Stuyvesant H.S. in New York and enrolled in the College as a pre-med student, switching to chemistry after a few memorable courses. ("I spent two years at Columbia convincing my parents that I shouldn't go to medical school," he told his audience.) He earned his doctorate in chemistry at Harvard in 1962, and joined Cornell's chemistry department in 1965.

Hoffman won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1981 (with Kenichi Fukui) for the development of mathematical theories to explain the behavior of atoms and molecules, and for co-authoring the Woodward-Hoffman Rule, which helps explain the workings of chemical reactions.

In his introduction, Dean Austin Quigley said of Hoffman, "As a research scientist, undergraduate teacher and imaginative writer, Roald Hoffman exemplifies the best of a Columbia College education." Hoffman "took the best of the varied things we have to offer and developed from them many things uniquely his own," Quigley added.

Certainly, Hoffman hasn't just put on a lab coat and hidden himself behind the nearest electron microscope. At Cornell, where he regularly teaches undergraduates, he is now Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters as well as a professor of chemistry. He has published three collections of poetry, Chemistry Imagined (an art/science/literature collaboration with artist Vivian Torrence), two books about chemistry for general readers, and collaborated on a PBS series, The World of Chemistry. Oxygen, a play (about chemists, appropriately) that he recently co-wrote with Carl Djerassi, is scheduled for production in England, Germany and the United States.

"Rarely have the potential benefits of a Columbia education been so remarkably realized as in the case of [Hoffman], whose imaginative journeys have traversed such varied intellectual terrain," said Quigley.