Cornell Professor Roald Hoffmann has been included among the top 75 chemists of the past 75 years in a special issue of Chemical & Engineering News, published Jan. 12. The late Peter Joseph William Debye, Cornell chemistry department chair in the 1940s, also was named to the list.

Chemical & Engineering News is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. The magazine is distributed to all 155,000 chemists and chemical engineers who are society members. The list of the "top 75 distinguished contributors to the chemical enterprise" was compiled based on voting by the magazine's readers.

Hoffmann is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and professor of chemistry. He won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1981 for work that helped establish qualitative molecular-orbital-based ways of thinking about the electronic and geometrical structure and reactivity of all molecules and for defining rules to predict the course of pericyclic reactions. He shared the prize with the late Kenichi Fukui.

Hoffmann also has been a recipient of the 1973 Arthur C. Cope Award of the American Chemical Society, the 1983 National Medal of Science, the 1986 National Academy of Sciences Award in the Chemical Sciences and the 1990 Priestly Medal. He has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, among them honorary doctor of science degrees from Columbia and Yale universities.

Hoffmann graduated from Columbia in 1958 and earned a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard in 1962. He began teaching at Cornell in 1965.

He also is a poet with two published collections of poetry, The Metamict State in 1987 and Gaps and Verges in 1990, both from the University of Central Florida Press.

"Roald Hoffmann has taught the chemical community new and useful ways to look at the geometry and reactivity of molecules, from organic, through inorganic, to infinitely extended structures," said Professor Paul Houston, chair of Cornell's Department of Chemistry. "But as important, his teaching is not confined to the journals, nor even to the freshman introductory chemistry courses that he teaches each year. He has participated in the production of a television course about chemistry, and he has written popular and scholarly articles on science and other subjects, including three popular books and two collections of poetry. Roald is not merely one of the most important chemists in the past 75 years, he is one of the most important educators."

Peter J. W. Debye won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1936 for his contributions to the study of molecular structures through the investigation of dipole moments and diffraction of x-rays and electrons in gases. A Dutch citizen, Debye was director of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, but was refused German citizenship and was forced to flee Nazi Germany. He came to Cornell in 1939 and was chair of the chemistry department from 1940 to 1950. He retired in 1952 and was an emeritus professor until his death in 1966.