mathematics faculty at Cambridge
Which employer did John Pople work for from 1954 to 1958?
John Pople Sir John Anthony Pople ( 31 October 1925 – 15 March 2004 ) was a British theoretical chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Kohn in 1998 for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry . Early life and education . Pople was born in Burnham-on-Sea , Somerset , and attended the Bristol Grammar School . He won a scholarship to Trinity College , Cambridge , in 1943 . He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1946 . Between 1945 and 1947 he worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company . He then returned to the University of Cambridge and was awarded his PhD in mathematics in 1951 on lone pair electrons . Career . After obtaining his PhD , he was a research fellow at Trinity College , Cambridge and then from 1954 a lecturer in the mathematics faculty at Cambridge . In 1958 , he moved to the National Physical Laboratory , near London as head of the new basics physics division . He moved to the United States of America in 1964 , where he lived the rest of his life , though he retained British citizenship . Pople considered himself more of a mathematician than a chemist , but theoretical chemists consider him one of the most important of their number . In 1964 he moved to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , where he had experienced a sabbatical in 1961 to 1962 . In 1993 he moved to Northwestern University in Evanston , Illinois where he was Trustees Professor of Chemistry until his death . Research . Poples major scientific contributions were in four different areas : Statistical mechanics of water . Poples early paper on the statistical mechanics of water , according to Michael J . Frisch , remained the standard for many years . This was his thesis topic for his PhD at Cambridge supervised by John Lennard-Jones . Nuclear magnetic resonance . In the early days of nuclear magnetic resonance he studied the underlying theory , and in 1959 he co-authored the textbook High Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance with W.G . Schneider and H.J . Bernstein . Semi-empirical theory . He made major contributions to the theory of approximate molecular orbital ( MO ) calculations , starting with one identical to the one developed by Rudolph Pariser and Robert G . Parr on pi electron systems , and now called the Pariser-Parr-Pople method . Subsequently , he developed the methods of Complete Neglect of Differential Overlap ( CNDO ) ( in 1965 ) and Intermediate Neglect of Differential Overlap ( INDO ) for approximate MO calculations on three-dimensional molecules , and other developments in computational chemistry . In 1970 he and David Beveridge coauthored the book Approximate Molecular Orbital Theory describing these methods . Ab initio electronic structure theory . Pople pioneered the development of more sophisticated computational methods , called ab initio quantum chemistry methods , that use basis sets of either Slater type orbitals or Gaussian orbitals to model the wave function . While in the early days these calculations were extremely expensive to perform , the advent of high speed microprocessors has made them much more feasible today . He was instrumental in the development of one of the most widely used computational chemistry packages , the Gaussian suite of programs , including coauthorship of the first version , Gaussian 70 . One of his most important original contributions is the concept of a model chemistry whereby a method is rigorously evaluated across a range of molecules . His research group developed the quantum chemistry composite methods such as Gaussian-1 ( G1 ) and Gaussian-2 ( G2 ) . In 1991 , Pople stopped working on Gaussian and several years later he developed ( with others ) the Q-Chem computational chemistry program . Prof . Poples departure from Gaussian , along with the subsequent banning of many prominent scientists , including himself , from using the software gave rise to considerable controversy among the quantum chemistry community . The Gaussian molecular orbital methods were described in the 1986 book Ab initio molecular orbital theory by Warren Hehre , Leo Radom , Paul v.R . Schleyer and Pople . Awards and honours . Pople received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998 . He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society ( FRS ) in 1961 . He was made a Knight Commander ( KBE ) of the Order of the British Empire in 2003 . He was a founding member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science . An IT room and a scholarship are named after him at Bristol Grammar School , as is a supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center . Personal life . Pople married Joy Bowers in 1952 and was married until her death from cancer in 2002 . Pople died of liver cancer in Chicago in 2004 . He was survived by his daughter Hilary , and sons Adrian , Mark and Andrew . In accordance with his wishes , Poples Nobel Medal was given to Carnegie Mellon University by his family on 5 October 2009 .