John Lennard-Jones
Sir John Edward Lennard-Jones , KBE , FRS (born October 27, 1894 in Leigh , Lancashire , † November 1, 1954 in Stoke-on-Trent ) was a British mathematician and theoretical physicist . He can be seen as the father of modern "computational chemistry".
Life
John Edward Jones studied mathematics at the University of Manchester from 1912 , interrupted by his participation in the First World War from 1915 with the Royal Flying Corps. In 1922 he received his doctorate in Manchester. He continued his studies as a research student under Ralph Fowler at Cambridge University , where he received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1924 with a semi-empirical approach to the force between atoms, the forerunner of his well-known work from 1931, in which he introduced a potential that the force between Describes noble gas molecules (attractive Van der Waals force and repulsion due to superposition of the fully occupied electron orbitals). In 1925 he married Kathleen Lennard and changed his name from Jones to Lennard-Jones .
1925–1932 he was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Bristol , where he published his well-known work on the structure of molecular orbitals from a linear combination of atomic orbitals in 1929 . In a paper from 1931 he introduced the Hartree-Fock method (method of self-consistent fields).
1932–1953 he was professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge. In 1933 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1937 founding director of the Institute for Numerical Mathematics in Cambridge (Cambridge University Mathematical Laboratory), where Maurice Wilkes also worked.
During the Second World War he held high positions as a scientific advisor a. a. in the Ministry of Supply and developed a laboratory for ballistic calculations. From 1946 he was back in Cambridge. In the same year he was knighted.
His students include Charles Coulson and Nobel Prize winner John Anthony Pople .
Web links
- Hall to the work of 1929 on molecular orbital theory (English)
- Biography on the side of the Royal Society (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lennard-Jones, John |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lennard-Jones, John Edward (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British mathematician and physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 27, 1894 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Leigh , Lancashire , England , United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 1, 1954 |
| Place of death | Stoke-on-Trent , England , UK |