Memory Effects

collection of poems

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia University and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).

"Applied theoretical chemistry" is the way Roald Hoffmann likes to characterize the particular blend of computations stimulated by experiment and the construction of generalized models, of frameworks for understanding, that is his contribution to chemistry.

Dr. Hoffmann also writes essays and poems. Two of his poetry collections, "The Metamict State" (1987) and "Gaps and Verges" (1990), have been published by the University Presses of Florida; his most recent collection, Memory Effects, (1999) by the Calhoun Press of Columbia College, Chicago.

In 1993 the Smithsonian Institution Press published "Chemistry Imagined". A unique art/science/literature collaboration of Roald Hoffmann with artist Vivian Torrence, "Chemistry Imagined" reveals the creative and humanistic sparks of the molecular science. In 1995, Columbia University Press published "The Same and Not the Same", a thoughtful account of the dualities that lie under the surface of chemistry. There will be German, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese editions of this book. In 1997 W.H. Freeman published Old Wine, New Flasks; Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition, by Roald Hoffmann and Shira Leibowitz Schmidt, a book of the intertwined voices of science and religion. Dr. Hoffmann is also is the presenter of a television course, "The World of Chemistry", now aired on many PBS stations and abroad.