John Pople

Who was John Pople?

Sir John Anthony Pople, KBE FRS was a Nobel-Prize winning theoretical chemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Kohn in the year 1998. He was born in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, England and attended the Bristol Grammar School. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1943. He received his B. A. in 1946. Between 1945 and 1947 he worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company. He then returned to Cambridge University and was awarded his doctorate degree in mathematics in 1951. He moved to the United States of America in 1964, where he lived the rest of his life, though he retained British citizenship. Pople considered himself more of a mathematician than a chemist, but theoretical chemists consider him one of the most important of their number.