Roald Hoffmann

Roald Hoffmann (born Roald Safran, July 18, 1937, in Zloczow, Poland, now Zolochiv, Ukraine) is a Polish-American theoretical chemist. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenichi Fukui for independently developed theories concerning the course of chemical reactions, work best known through the Woodward-Hoffmann rules, which he devised with Robert Burns Woodward to explain and predict the stereochemistry of pericyclic reactions. Hoffmann spent most of his career at Cornell University, where he became the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus, and beyond chemistry he is also a published poet and playwright.