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Prof. Roald Hoffmann Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Office: G50 Baker Laboratory Phone: (607) 255-3419 Email: rh34(at)cornell.edu |
For more information about Prof. Hoffmann, his poetry, plays, books, and articles, visit his official website. The following biographical sketch is taken from that website:
Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the
war, he came to the U.S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and
Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell
University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters.
He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the
1981
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared 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. The
pedagogical perspective is very strong in his work.
Notable at the same time is his reaching out to the general public; he
participated, for example, in the production of a television course in
introductory chemistry titled "The World of Chemistry," shown widely
since 1990. And, as a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between
science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays and three books,
Chemistry Imagined with artist Vivian Torrence, The Same and Not the
Same and Old Wine (translated into six languages), New Flasks:
Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition, with Shira Leibowitz
Schmidt.
Hoffmann is also an accomplished poet and playwright. He began writing
poetry in the mid-1970s, eventually publishing the first of a number of
collections, The Metamict State, in 1987, followed three years later by
Gaps and Verges, then Memory Effects (1999), Soliton (2002), and most
recently, in Spanish, Catalista. He has also co-written a play with
fellow chemist Carl Djerassi, entitled Oxygen, which has been performed
worldwide, translated into ten languages. A second play by Roald
Hoffmann, Should’ve, had its initial workshop production in Edmonton,
Canada in 2006.
Unadvertised, a monthly cabaret Roald runs at the Cornelia Street Café
in Greenwich Vilage, "Entertaining Science," has become the hot cheap
ticket in NYC.