John Pople

John Pople was an English theoretical chemist who trained as a mathematician and shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing computational methods in quantum chemistry. Born in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, he read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took Part III of the Mathematical Tripos and completed a doctorate in 1951 on lone pair electrons under the molecular orbital theorist John Lennard-Jones. He lectured in mathematics at Cambridge from 1954 to 1958, worked on the theory behind nuclear magnetic resonance, and spent six years at the National Physical Laboratory before moving to Carnegie Mellon University in 1964. There he turned approximate molecular orbital methods into systematic numerical calculation and released the Gaussian program, first published in 1970, which chemists still use to study molecules and reactions without a laboratory. He later held a chair at Northwestern University and was knighted in 2003. His career is a clear example of mathematical modelling applied to a physical science.