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Up for sale RARE "Nobel Prize in Chemistry" Roald Hoffman Hand Written TLS Dated 2003. This item comes authenticated by Todd Mueller and comes with their Certificate of Authenticity.
ES-1607
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Roald Hoffmann (born Roald
Safran; July 18, 1937) is a Polish-American theoretical chemist who
won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
He has also published plays and poetry. He is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor
of Humane Letters, Emeritus, at Cornell University,
in Ithaca, New York.
Hoffmann was born in Złoczów, Second Polish to a Polish-Jewish family, and was named in honor of the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. His parents were Clara (Rosen), a teacher, and
Hillel Safran, a civil engineer. After Germany invaded Poland and
occupied the town, his family was placed in a labor camp where his father, who
was familiar with much of the local infrastructure, was a valued prisoner. As
the situation grew more dangerous, with prisoners being transferred to
extermination camps, the family bribed guards to allow an escape and arranged
with a Ukrainian neighbor named Mykola Dyuk for Hoffmann, his mother, two
uncles and an aunt to hide in the attic and a storeroom of the local
schoolhouse, where they remained for eighteen months, from January 1943 to June
1944, while Hoffmann was aged 5 to 7. His
father remained at the labor camp, but was able to occasionally visit, until he
was tortured and killed by the Germans for his involvement in a plot to arm the
camp prisoners. When she received the news, his mother attempted to contain her
sorrow by writing down her feelings in a notebook her husband had been using to
take notes on a relativity textbook he had been reading. While in hiding his
mother kept Hoffmann entertained by teaching him to read and having him
memorize geography from textbooks stored in the attic, then quizzing him on it.
He referred to the experience as having been enveloped in a cocoon of love. Most
of the rest of the family perished in the Holocaust, though one grandmother and a few others
survived. They migrated to the United States on the troop carrier Ernie
Pyle in 1949. Hoffmann married Eva
Börjesson in 1960. They have two children, Hillel Jan and Ingrid Helena. Hoffmann
visited Zolochiv with his adult son (by then a parent of a
five-year-old) in 2006 and found that the attic where he had hidden was still
intact, but the storeroom had been incorporated, ironically enough, into a
chemistry classroom. In 2009, a monument to Holocaust victims was built
in Zolochiv on Hoffmann's initiative. He is an atheist.
Hoffmann graduated in 1955 from New York
City's Stuyvesant High School, where
he won a Westinghouse science
scholarship. He received his bachelor of arts degree at Columbia University (Columbia
College) in 1958. He earned his master of arts degree in 1960 from Harvard University. He
earned his doctor of philosophy degree
from Harvard University while
working under joint supervision of Martin Gouterman and subsequent
1976 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner William N. Lipscomb, Jr. Hoffman worked on the molecular
orbital theory of polyhedral molecules.[15] Under Lipscomb's direction
the Extended Hückel method was
developed by Lawrence Lohr and by Roald Hoffmann.[18][22] This method was later extended by Hoffmann.
He went to Cornell in 1965 and has remained there, becoming
professor emeritus.