Harry King to Give Pulay Lecture, 'History of Molecular Electronic Theory,' Today

Harry F. King of the University at Buffalo will give the 2025 Pulay Lecture, titled History of Molecular Electronic Theory. The talk will take place from 3-4 p.m. on Monday, April 14, in the Chemistry Building, room 144. The talk is free and open to the public.

King will give a brief history of molecular electronic theory with a focus on the development of computational methods rather than applications. He will speak about variational methods, the Dirac equation, coupled cluster theory, gradients and higher energy derivatives, and his suggestion for a new research project were he an active professor.

King received his B.S. from MIT in 1953 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1960. He was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge in 1961 with one of the founders of modern theoretical chemistry, Francis F. Boys. He was a postdoc at the University of Illinois. Following the advice of Bob Parr (who became a famous developer of density functional theory), King applied at the University at Buffalo and was appointed to an assistant professorship. King has been at UB since then, earning emeritus status in 2010. He was an NIH Special Fellow in 1971, an Invited Foreign Scholar to Japan in 1978 and was a program officer for Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at NSF in 1993.

This lecture series is named for Dr. Peter Pulay. Pulay is the Roger B. Bost Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the U of A. His main contributions are methods and applications of electronic structure theory.

The lecture series was made possible by the generosity of Jamie M. Coffin. Coffin received a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the U of A in 1989. His extensive career in high-performance scientific computing and data management has been pivotal in shaping advancements in the industry.