Chemist John Anthony Pope

On October 31, 1925, John Pope, a British chemist and 1998 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, was born.
John Anthony Popple (October 31, 1925-March 15, 2004) was a British chemist and one of the winners of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

John was born in Burnham on Sea, a small town in Somerset, England. His father was a merchant who ran a clothing store, and his mother came from a peasant family. As a teenager, Pope attended Bristol Secondary School, where he now has a computer room and a scholarship named after Pope. Young Pope entered the University of Cambridge, England, becoming the first university student in his family. Pope received his bachelor's degree in 1946 and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in mathematics in 1951. Although he received a degree in mathematics, Pope's doctoral thesis was on chemistry: the valence bond structure of water molecules. John Pope immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s and lived there until his death, but he retained his British citizenship. Pope himself preferred to consider himself a mathematician rather than a chemist, but theoretical chemists generally agreed that John Anthony Pope was one of their most important members.

John Pope's first major contribution was the molecular orbital approximation theory for ¦Ð-electron systems proposed in 1953. Since theoretical chemists Rudolph Pariser and Robert Parser also proposed a similar method equivalent to Pope's theory in the same year, this approximation method is now known as the PPP method. In 1965 Pope proposed the CNDO method, which completely ignores the integral of the heteronuclear two electrons, and the INDO method, which partially ignores the integral of the heteronuclear two electrons. CNDO and INDO are still widely used semi-empirical quantum chemical calculation methods for approximating the structural properties of molecules in three-dimensional molecules. In addition, Pope also made many significant contributions to the development of computational chemistry theory. John Pope improved the ab initio method of quantum chemistry by introducing the basis set of Slater and Gaussian functions to simulate the wave function, which greatly reduced the computational cost of the ab initio method, and today's rapidly developing computer technology has highlighted the advantages of Pope's new method in calculation. John Pope's best-known contribution is his instrumentalization of computational chemistry theory and development of the most widely used quantum chemistry computing program package GAUSSIAN, but unfortunately, after 1991, Pope was not only excluded from the development team of GAUSSIAN software, but even banned from the company's use of this software.

Prior to 1986, Pope served at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he made major theoretical contributions in his early years. Pope left Carnegie Mellon University in 1986 and moved to Chicago to work at Northwestern University. In 1998, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his outstanding contribution to quantum chemical computing methods; in 2003, he was knighted.