ON THE EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS OF E.J. COREY

E.J. Corey is a singular figure in organic synthesis, like Robert Burns Woodward before him, and, like Robert Burns Woodward before him, he has won the Nobel prize for his work there. By extension, due to some conversations he was party to at the birth of the ideas of orbitals in chemistry, he, by extension of his greatness, assumed he had done the work there for another Nobel prize. That this is not true is explicated in the following statement.

The extended Hueckel method was the first scheme to explicitly generalize the concept and use of orbitals in quantum mechanical calculations of molecules. Roald Hoffmann was the principal architect of extended Hueckel as an algorithm applicable across the Periodic Table. After extended Hueckel Roald Hoffmann moved to introduce the orbital not only numerically in computations, but as an iconographic device from which relationships and theories of excited states and ground states of molecules could be worked out, through which chemical reaction mechanisms could be profitably dissected, through which electronic structures of molecules in 0-, 1-, 2- and 3-dimensions could be schematically pictured, etc. The principal results of this grand body of work are (1) an isolobal analogy construct of fragments of molecules containing elements drawn from across the Periodic table to explain their chemical properties (2) a theory of electrocyclic organic chemical reactions based upon concepts of symmetry of MO's in their quantum mechanical formulation, and a set of rules underpinning electrocyclic reactivity (3) the explicit and ubiquitous introduction of orbitals as iconographic objects in discussing and rationalizing the electronic spectroscopy of molecules across the Periodic Table (4) the explicit introduction of these iconographic orbitals, with their strict group theoretical quantum mechanical underpinnings in the language of solid state theory (5) the orbital description of the insulator-to-metal transition in organic crystalline allotropic materials by iconographic reasoning (6) the richness with which the extended Hueckel method that Roald Hoffmann was the principal architect of, was applied to many many chemical systems as diverse as catalytic surfaces, to hypothetical inorganic and organic materials.

In this list of accomplishments one sees the reasons for the Nobel prize to Roald Hoffmann. Oppositely, it appears that E.J. Corey's only claim to any credit in all of this, is with respect to (2) in the list above, where he MAY have made a CHANCE COMMENT on chemical reactivity early on and never properly followed up on it. The point is moot indeed. E.J. Corey had virtually NO INFLUENCE on Roald Hoffmann's career as a theorist.