Jerry Karle died a couple of weeks ago, and one of us here learned about
it by noticing his obituary in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/health/jerome-karle-94-dies-nobelist-for-crystallography.html?_r=0
He's well known to those of us who started in this field when the solving
of a Patterson function for a heavy atom in a structure was the only way
we knew to get the structure. With Herb Hauptman, and in close teamwork
with his wife Isabella who actually >did< crystallography, he played a
major role in working out the sort of Direct Methods that allowed one to
solve ordinary small-molecule structures before the days of high-speed
computing. As the obituary points out, Jerry and Herb shared the 1985
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. The obit. is worth reading. I
suspect you'll see an even better one in Nature soon.
My own tiny personal memory of Jerry Karle: When I was a grad student at
the Univ. of Wisc. with Larry Dahl I made a pilgrimage to the NRL to visit
Jerry and Isabella. I was trying to use direct methods to solve at least
one cephalosporin structure, which eventually appeared in my thesis, and
there was a feature of DM that I failed to understand. They were very
patient with me, but couldn't understand what it was I didn't get. It
turns out to have been essentially trivial, but that's the way it goes
sometimes. Anyway he always recognized me afterwards, or pretended to.
I was delighted on arriving at BNL to discover that his daughter Louise
was here.
Bob
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Robert M. Sweet E-Dress: sw...@bnl.gov
Group Leader, PXRR: Macromolecular ^ (that's L
Crystallography Research Resource at NSLS not 1)
http://px.nsls.bnl.gov/
Photon Sciences and Biosciences Dept
Office and mail, Bldg 745, a.k.a. LOB-5
Brookhaven Nat'l Lab. Phones:
Upton, NY 11973 631 344 3401 (Office)
U.S.A. 631 344 2741 (Facsimile)
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