Same and Not the Same

Roald Hoffmann was born in Zloczow, Poland, in 1937. Having survived the Nazi occupation, he arrived in the U.S. in 1949, after several years of postwar wandering in Europe. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School, Columbia University, and proceeded to take his Ph.D. in 1962, at Harvard University, working with W. N. Lipscomb and Martin Gouterman. Dr. Hoffmann stayed on at Harvard University from 1962-1965, as a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows. Since 1965, he has been at Cornell University, where he is now the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus. Professor Hoffmann is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He has been elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, the Indian National Science Academy, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Nordrhein-Westfallische Academy of Sciences, and the Leopoldina. He has received numerous honors, including over twenty-five honorary degrees. He is the only person ever to have received the American Chemical Society's awards in three different specific subfields of chemistry - the A. C. Cope Award in Organic Chemistry, the Award in Inorganic Chemistry, and the Pimentel Award in Chemical Education. As well as two other ACS awards. In 1981, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenichi Fukui. "Applied theoretical chemistry" is the way Roald Hoffmann likes to characterize the particular blend of computations stimulated by experiment and the construction of generalized models, of frameworks for understanding, that is his contribution to chemistry. In more than 500 scientific articles and two books he has taught the chemical community new and useful ways to look at the geometry and reactivity of molecules, from organic through inorganic to infinitely extended structures. Dr. Hoffmann participated in the production of a television course about chemistry. "The World of Chemistry" is a series of 26 half-hour programs developed at the University of Maryland and produced by Richard Thomas. Dr. Hoffmann is the Presenter for the series, which has been aired on PBS beginning in 1990, and has been shown widely abroad. Roald Hoffmann has also written popular and scholarly articles on science and other subjects. His poetry has appeared in various literary magazines. Two collections, entitled "The Metamict State" (1987) and "Gaps and Verges" (1990), were published by the University of Florida Press; "Memory Effects," was published in 1999 by the Calhoun Press of Columbia College, Chicago. At the end of 2002 two poetry collections were published by Roald Hoffmann, "Soliton," by Truman State University Press, and volume of selected poems translated into Spanish, "Catalista."

• Part One: Identity-the Central Problem 1. Lives of the Twins 2. What Are You? 3. Whirligigs 4. Fighting Reductionism 5. The Fish, the Worm, and the Molecule 6. Telling Them Apart 7. Isomerism 8. Are There Two Identical Molecules? 9. Handshakes in the Dark 10. Molecular Mimicry Part Two: The Way It Is Told 11. The Chemical Article 12. And How It Came to Be That Way 13. Beneath the Surface 14. The Semiotics of Chemistry 15. What DOES That Molecule Look Like? 16. Representation and Reality 17. Struggles 18. The Id Will Out Part Three: Making Molecules 19. Creation and Discovery 20. In Praise of Synthesis 21. Cubane, and the Art of Making It 22. The Aganippe Fountain 23. Natural/Unnatural 24. Out to Lunch 25. Why We Prefer the Natural 26. Janus and Nonlinearity Part Four: When Something is Wrong 27. Thalidomide 28. The Social Responsibility of Scientists Part Five: How, Just Exactly, Does it Happen? 29. Mechanism 30. The Salieri Syndrome 31. Static/Dynamic 32. Equilibrium and Perturbing It Part Six: A Life in Chemistry 33. Fritz Haber Part Seven: That Certain Magic 34. Catalyst! 35. Three Ways 36. Carboxypeptidase Part Eight: Value, Harm, and Democracy 37. Tyrian Purple, Woad, and Indigo 38. Chemistry and Industry 39. Athens 40. The Democratizing Nature of Chemistry 41. Environmental Concerns 42. Science and Technology in Classical Democracy 43. Anti-Plato; or, Why Scientists (or Engineers) Shouldn't Run the World 44. A Response to Worries About the Environment 45. Chemistry, Education, and Democracy Part Nine: The Adventures of a Diatomic 46. C2 In All Its Guises Part Ten: The Dualities That Enliven 47. Creation Is Hard Work 48. Missing 49. An Attribute of the Devil 50. Chemistry Tense, Full of Life? 51. Cheiron