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Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann Visits Hunter

On Friday, December 9, Hunter welcomed Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann to the Department of Chemistry’s seminar series. Hoffmann shared lunch, shop talk and advice with Hunter grad students and chemistry majors, listening to every student describe their field of study and latest projects. Afterward, to an overflow crowd in Hunter North, he gave a memorable lecture titled “Two New Games for Carbon, We Hope.”

The event was hosted by Professor Mandë Holford and Professor Emeritus Klaus Grohmann, Hoffmann’s longtime friend. Dean Andrew Polsky offered opening remarks, and Hoffmann later said that he enjoyed Dean Polsky’s emphasis on the importance of scientists having a broad education in the liberal arts.

That’s an unsurprising reaction from a brilliant chemist also known for being a Renaissance man. Beyond the sciences, Hoffmann is widely admired for his plays, poetry (he recited a poem during his Hunter lecture), philosophical essays and educational TV show – as well as his monthly cabaret, Entertaining Science, at the Cornelia Street Café.

Born in Poland before World War II, Hoffmann came to the U.S. when he was 12, attended college at Columbia, earned a PhD at Harvard, and taught at Cornell, where he is now professor emeritus. He won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for working with Robert Burns Woodward on devising what are now known as the “Woodward-Hoffmann” rules – rules whose elegance and simplicity have made them critical tools in teaching and learning organic chemistry.

“Roald Hoffmann is probably the most influential chemist in the world today,” says Hunter’s Charles Drain, professor of chemistry and department chair. “Everyone who has taken organic chemistry is familiar with the Woodward-Hoffmann rules.”

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