John A. Pople life and biography

John Anthony Pople was a Nobel-Prize winning theoretical chemist. Born in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, England, he attended Bristol Grammar School. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1943. He received his B. A. in 1946. Between 1945 and 1947 he worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company. He then returned to Cambridge University and was awarded his doctorate degree in mathematics in 1951. He moved to the United States of America in 1964, where he lived the rest of his life, though he retained British citizenship. Pople considered himself more of a mathematician than a chemist, but theoretical chemists consider him one of the most important of their number.

After obtaining his Ph D, he was a research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge and then from 1954 a lecturer in the mathematics faculty at Cambridge. In 1958, he moved to the National Physical Laboratory, near London as head of the new basics physics division. In 1964 he moved to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he had experienced a sabbatical in 1961 to 1962. In 1993 he moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois where he was Trustees Professor of Chemistry until his death.

He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1961. He was made a Knight Commander (KBE) of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. He was a founding member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

An IT room and a scholarship are named after him at Bristol Grammar School, as is a supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

"In late 1947, I was attempting to learn to play the piano and rented an instrument for the attic in which I lived in the most remote part of Trinity College. The neighbouring room was occupied by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had retired to live in primitive and undisturbed conditions in the same attic area. There is some evidence that my musical efforts distracted him so much that he left Cambridge shortly thereafter." (from his Nobel autobiography)

Awards:

Nobel Prize for Chemistry 1998 (with Walter Kohn)
Davy Medal 1988
Wolf Prize in Chemistry 1992
Copley Medal 2002
Knighthood 2003
International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science
Royal Society 1961
American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1971

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