Northwestern chemistry Prof. John Pople’s next trip to England won’t be just another visit to his homeland — this summer Pople will be knighted for his contributions to the field of chemistry.
The award of the Insignia of a Knight Commander of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire will be a lengthy addition to his already long list of accolades, including the Nobel Prize, an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University and the 1992 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. Pople’s Web page lists 18 other honors.
“I am of course pleased that Prof. Pople was so honored,” said University President Henry Bienen in an e-mail Monday. “He is a most distinguished person, Nobel Prize winner and now with a knighthood. We are honored that he is at Northwestern.”
Pople’s main contribution was the application of mathematical methods to model chemical processes. After developing the models, he created computer algorithms so scientists could easily follow his methods through GAUSSIAN, a computer program used by thousands of scientists in numerous fields.
“I thought the kind of work I was doing would eventually have a very big impact,” Pople said, adding that his impact was accelerated by how quickly computers developed. “But it wasn’t something that happened overnight.”
The models are useful for chemistry problems where taking measurements is difficult or impossible — such as monitoring activity on the sun or chemical reactions that last only a moment, chemistry Prof. Mark Ratner said.
“He’s an amazing guy,” Ratner said. “He has basically changed the way chemists do chemistry.”
Changing the future of chemistry was not what Pople set out to do. He was the first in a family of farmers and clothing store owners to attend a university, he wrote in his Nobel autobiography.
“I became interested in math when I was young,” he said.
Pople read through entire algebra and calculus texts by the time he was 13 and then embarked on research. He thought he developed the concept of the factorial on his own while determining the number of possible teams that could be formed on a playground.
“I thought this was original work, but was mortified to find n! described in a textbook,” he wrote.
After completing two years of study at Cambridge University in 1945, Pople said his interest in pure mathematics began to fade and he decided to apply the discipline to some branch of science, finally settling on chemistry.
“What I find interesting is how mathematics are used to solve problems (in science),” he said.
After Pople completed his studies, he held research and teaching positions at Cambridge until 1958.
“There were very exciting things going on in Cambridge at that time,” Pople said, describing James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double-helix shape of DNA. Pople knew several scientists who were making groundbreaking discoveries and later became Nobel laureates themselves.
After moving from England to Pittsburgh in 1964, Pople took a position at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he developed a mathematical process that won him the Nobel Prize.
Pople came to NU in 1993 after he and his wife, whom he met while she was teaching him piano in England, moved to Illinois to be near their daughter.
Pople holds an adjunct appointment and continues his research while serving as the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry.
