Herbert A. Hauptman

Herbert Aaron Hauptman was an American mathematician and Nobel laureate, born in New York City on 14 February 1917 and died in Buffalo on 23 October 2011, who pioneered a mathematical method that changed the whole field of chemistry by opening a new era in the determination of molecular structures of crystallized materials. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1937, obtained an M.A. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1939 and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1955. With Jerome Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory he tackled the phase problem of X-ray crystallography, and their 1953 monograph introduced probabilistic methods through a development of the Sayre equation. The two shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and from 1970 he worked at the Medical Foundation of Buffalo, later the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.