MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College will host a lecture and poetry reading Thursday, Feb. 1, by Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who also has written books of poetry and nonfiction, plus a play related to the discovery of oxygen.
Hoffmann will lecture at 11 a.m. on “Chemistry’s Essential Tension: The Same and Not the Same.” The lecture will address the position chemistry takes within the realm of the sciences: not dealing with the infinitely small or large, but on a human scale, affecting life all around us. At 3 p.m. Hoffmann will read from his poetry. Both events are in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons and are free.
Hoffmann, a native of Poland who survived the Nazi occupation, is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and professor of chemistry at Cornell University. He won the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry for theories concerning the course of chemical reactions. He shared the prize with the late Kenichi Fukui.
Hoffmann’s literary works include books of poems, “The Metamict State” (1987) and “Gaps and Verges” (1990); “Chemistry Imagined” (1993), a book about art, science and literature written with artist Vivian Torrence; “The Same and Not the Same” (1995), an account of the dualities in chemistry; and “Old Wine, New Flasks; Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition” (1997), a book he co-authored on the intertwined voices of science and religion.
In 1999, Hoffmann and Stanford University chemistry professor Carl Djerassi, best known as the developer of the oral contraceptive pill, wrote “Oxygen.” The play alternates between 1777, when oxygen is discovered, to 2001, when the Nobel Foundation decides to begin awarding a “retro-Nobel” for great discoveries that preceded the establishment of the Nobel prizes 100 years before. Djerassi spoke at Cornell in April 1995.
Hoffmann has been honored by the American Chemical Society with the 1973 Arthur C. Cope Award in Organic Chemistry, the 1990 Priestly Medal and in 1998 was named one of the top 75 chemists over the past 75 years by Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society. He was awarded the 1983 National Medal of Science and the 1986 National Academy of Sciences Award in the Chemical Sciences. In 1990 he hosted a 26-segment television documentary, “The World of Chemistry,” that has aired on many PBS stations and abroad.
See these links for more information on Roald Hoffmann:
www.nobel.se
www.cornell.edu