Short Biography
Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Złoczów, Poland. Having survived World War II, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).
At Cornell, Hoffmann taught introductory chemistry half of his time. Notable also is his reaching out to the general public; he was the presenter, for example, of a television course in chemistry titled "The World of Chemistry," shown widely since 1990.
As a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays, five non-fiction books, three plays and seven published collection of poetry, including bilingual Spanish-English and Russian-English editions published in Madrid, Orihuela, and Moscow.