1. John Pople won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1943.
14 Facts About John Pople
1. 2.
John Pople received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1946.
3.
John Pople then returned to the University of Cambridge and was awarded his PhD in mathematics in 1951 on lone pair electrons.
4.
John Pople moved to the United States of America in 1964, where he lived the rest of his life, though he retained British citizenship.
5.
John Pople considered himself more of a mathematician than a chemist, but theoretical chemists consider him one of the most important of their number.
6.
John Pople pioneered the development of more sophisticated computational methods, called ab initio quantum chemistry methods, that use basis sets of either Slater type orbitals or Gaussian orbitals to model the wave function.
7.
John Pople was instrumental in the development of one of the most widely used computational chemistry packages, the Gaussian suite of programs, including coauthorship of the first version, Gaussian 70.
8.
In 1991, John Pople stopped working on Gaussian and several years later he developed the Q-Chem computational chemistry program.
9.
John Pople received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1992, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998.
10.
John Pople was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1961.
11.
John Pople was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.
12.
John Pople was a founding member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.
13.
John Pople married Joy Bowers in 1952 and was married until her death from cancer in 2002.
14.
John Pople was survived by his daughter Hilary, and sons Adrian, Mark and Andrew.