John Lennard-Jones

John Edward Lennard -Jones KBE, FRS ( born October 27, 1894 in Leigh, Lancashire, † November 1, 1954 in Stoke -on-Trent ) was a mathematician and theoretical physicist. It can be regarded as the father of modern "computational chemistry".

Life

John Edward Jones studied mathematics from 1912 at the University of Manchester, interrupted by participation in the First World War from 1915 in the Royal Flying Corps. In 1922 he received his PhD in Manchester. He continued his studies as a research student under Ralph Fowler continued at Cambridge University, where he in 1924 in theoretical physics doctorate with a semi- empirical approach for the force between atoms, forerunner of his famous work of 1931, in which he introduces the Lennard -Jones potential, that the force between noble gas molecules describes ( attractive van der Waals force and repulsion by superimposing the fully occupied electron orbitals ). In 1925 he married Kathleen Lennard and changed his name from Jones Lennard -Jones. 1925-1932 he was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Bristol, where in 1929 he published his famous work on the construction of molecular orbitals from a linear combination of atomic orbitals. In a paper from the year 1931, he led the Hartree- Fock method a (method of self-consistent fields). 1932-1953 he was a professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge. In 1933 he was a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1937 and the founding director of the Institute for Numerical Mathematics at Cambridge (Cambridge University Mathematical Laboratory), which also Maurice Wilkes worked. During World War II he had high positions as a scientific advisor, among others in the Ministry of the supply (Ministry of Supply) and built a laboratory for ballistic calculations. From 1946 he was back in Cambridge. In the same year he was knighted.

Among his students Charles Coulson and Nobel Laureate John Anthony Pople.

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