Frontier Orbitals and Reaction Paths: Selected Papers of Kenichi Fukui

This book is a collection of selected papers on the Frontier Orbital Theory by Nobel prizewinner Kenichi Fukui (Chemistry 1981), with introductory notes. It provides the basic concept and formulation of the theory, and the physical and chemical significance of the frontier orbital interactions in chemistry, together with many practical applications. The formulation of the Intrinsic Reaction Coordinate and applications to some simple systems are also presented. The aim of this volume is to show by what forces chemical reactions are driven and to demonstrate how the regio- and stereo-selectivities are determined in chemical reactions. Students and senior investigators will gain insight into the nature of chemical reactions and find out how quantum chemical calculations are connected with chemical intuition.

Kenichi Fukui was co-recipient (together with Roald Hoffmann) of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his "frontier orbital theory" concerning the course of chemical reactions. While he began his career as an experimentalist, in the course of his investigation of organic reactions he built up a subgroup of theoreticians. In 1952, Dr. Fukui discovered the correlation between the frontier orbital density and the chemical reactivity in aromatic hydrocarbons, leading to the development of the more general chemical reactivity theory by his group. Dr. Fukui was a professor at Kyoto University from 1945 until 1982, when he assumed the presidency of the Kyoto Institute of Technology for six years. In 1988, he became the founding director of the Institute for Fundamental Chemistry, also in Kyoto. He is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Royal Society, and has been honoured with many other memberships and awards.

Hiroshi Fujimoto was one of Dr. Fukui's students. He worked for Dr. Fukui from 1965 until 1982. During this period, he spent a year and a half at Cornell University, working for Dr. Roald Hoffmann. At present, he is a professor in the Division of Molecular Engineering, which was founded in Kyoto University about a year after Dr. Fukui's receipt of the Nobel Prize.