Dudley R. Herschbach

Robert Dudley Herschbach ( born June 18, 1932 in San Jose, California) is an American chemist. Herschbach was honored in 1986 with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi for work in the field of dynamics of chemical processes with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Dudley Herschbach grew up near San Jose on in the country and studied from 1950 chemistry ( and math with a bachelor 's degree, including at George Polya, Gabor Szego ) at Stanford University, where he graduated in 1955 his master's degree in chemistry at Harold Johnston. In 1956 he received a master's degree in physics at Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1958 at Edgar Bright Wilson in chemical physics (Internal rotation and microwave spectroscopy). The dissertation dealt with the restricted internal rotational degrees of freedom of the methyl groups in molecules and was both theoretically and experimentally (microwave spectroscopy). 1957 to 1959 he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. Then he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an Assistant Professor in 1959 and 1961, Associate Professor of Chemistry. There he began his molecular beam experiments to study simple chemical reactions, continue as a professor at Harvard from 1963., The crossed beam experiments were particular with Yuan Lee, who as a post- graduate student came to Herschbachs group in 1967, refined, for example, techniques of experimental nuclear physics. In 1976 he was Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard. 1964-1977 he stood there before the program Chemical Physics and 1977 to 1980 he was CEO of chemistry faculty. 1981 to 1986 he was with his wife head (master ) of Currier House at Harvard. Today he is a professor emeritus (2010). Since 2005 he is also professor of physics at Texas A & M University.

Herschbach 1963 was a visiting professor at the University of Göttingen in 1968 as a Guggenheim Fellow at the Albert- Ludwigs- University of Freiburg. In 1976 he was Fairchild Scholar at Caltech. He was a consultant with Exxon ( at their research laboratories and as Exxon Faculty Fellow, 1981), at Los Alamos National Laboratory ( where he performed also part of the work for his dissertation ), and at the company Aerodyne. Since 1980 he was co-editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry. He was in the Council of the Center for Arms Control and Non- proliferation.

Herschbach is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1967 ) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964). He received the ACS Pure Chemistry Prize in (1965 ), the Linus Pauling Medal ( 1978), the Langmuir Prize ( 1983) and the Michael Polanyi Medal ( 1981). He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto (1977).

1992 to 2010 he was chairman of the Society for Science and the Public in Washington DC

He is married to the chemist Georgene Botyos since 1964 and has two daughters. His wife was before her retirement in 2009 chairman of the Committee for Undergraduate Education at Harvard.

In 2003 Herschbach entered as a character in this episode death Greetings from Springfield of The Simpsons. He called it in the original itself

Writings

• Internal rotation and microwave spectroscopy. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1958.
• Molecular collisions and chemical physics. World Scientific Press, Singapore, 1998, ISBN 981-02-1797-8.

• Chemical Kinetics. Butterworths, London 1976, ISBN 0-408-70608-2.
• Dimensional scaling in chemical physics. Kluwer Publ, Dordrecht 1993, ISBN 0-7923-2036-0.
• In memoriam Otto Stern on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Springer International, Berlin 1988.