\tHerbert Aaron Hauptman
Hauptman, Herbert Aaron (1917-), an American theoretical chemist, shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in chemistry with his co-worker Jerome Karle for devising improved mathematical methods to determine the structure of a crystal struck by X rays.
Hauptman was born on Feb. 14, 1917, in New York City. He grew up in the part of the city known as the Bronx and graduated from Townsend Harris High School. In 1937, he received a bachelor of science degree in mathematics from City College of New York. He earned a master's degree in mathematics from Columbia University in 1939 and a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1955.
From 1940 to 1942, Hauptman worked as a statistician for the Bureau of the Census. From 1942 to 1943 and 1946 to 1947, he worked as an instructor in electronics and radar at the U.S. Army Air Force base in Boca Raton, Florida.
In 1947, Hauptman became a researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. There he began his collaboration with Karle, a physical chemist and fellow graduate of City College. Most of the work that led to their Nobel Prize was done at the laboratory from 1950 to 1956.
Hauptman and Karle focused their study on X-ray crystallography, a method of determining the atomic structure of a substance by passing a beam of X rays through a pure crystal of the substance and analyzing the pattern of diffraction of the rays after they have passed through the crystal. The X rays are scattered from the rows of regularly spaced atoms in the crystal and captured on photographic film. When this film is analyzed, the arrangement of the atoms within the substance can be determined.
Scattered rays reinforce each other if their waves are “in step” or cancel each other out if they are “out of step.” The spacing of the atoms and the angle of the scattering produce a pattern of bright and dark spots unique to that substance. Using traditional methods of X-ray crystallography, interpreting the patterns of atoms on the photographic plates could take a year or more, because while photographic film could record the intensity of the spots, it could not record the phases (small deviations from straight lines) of the X rays. The combination of Hauptman's ability in mathematics and Karle's skills in physical chemistry enabled the two scientists to develop a new method of analysis in X-ray crystallography to solve this problem.
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