Pople, Sir John Anthony

Pople, Sir John Anthony (pōp`əl), 1925–2004, British computational chemist. Trained as a mathematician at Cambridge (B.A. 1946, Ph.D. 1951), he worked at Cambridge (1951–58) and England's National Physical Laboratory (1958–64) then lived in the United States where he taught at Carnegie-Mellon Univ. (1964–93) and Northwestern Univ. (1993–2004). During the 1960s he first developed a computer program that modeled the properties and activity of molecules in chemical reactions, and in 1970 the Gaussian-70 computational chemistry program was published. Pople shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Walter Kohn for the development of methods that permit chemists to analyze theoretically the properties of molecules and chemical reactions. He was knighted in 2003.