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Clemens C.J. Roothaan was born in 1918
in Nijmwegen, The
Netherlands. He commenced studying electrical engineering at Delft,
Netherlands, in 1935. Due to the problems of World War II and the
German occupation of the Netherlands he was persecuted because of
his ethnic background and was brought first to a prisoner of war camp
in the Netherlands were he, together with other imprisoned professors
and students, could perform some calculatory work in physics,
under the formal guidance of and for the Dutch Philips
industrial company; after that he was detained in a concentration camp
for one year. His theoretical work for the Philips company was
recognized after the war in 1945 when he received his Master's degree
on this basis. Roothaan could obtain a postgraduate fellowship at the University of Chicago, physics department, where he started in 1946. At that time there were Fermi, Teller, Goeppert-Mayer and Robert Mulliken at the faculty. Goeppert-Mayer had got Roothaan a post with Herzfeld at the Catholic University at Washington while he actually worked for his Ph.D. thesis with Mulliken on semiempirical MO theory ... [continued below] ... At left C.C.J. Roothaan in 1991. Craig Burleigh Photography © 1991 |
And now:
THE CLASSIC of LCAO MO Theory This paper was the most cited paper of the years 1945-1954 (source: Citation Index). C.C.J. Roothaan : New Developments in Molecular Orbital Theory. Rev. Mod. Phys. 23, 69-89 (1951). Read it here. Get it in one single chunk - 8 MB! - here. |