A Century of Chemical Dynamics Traced through the Nobel Prizes. 1998: Walter Kohn and John Pople

The 1998 Nobel Prize was awarded to Walter Kohn "for his development of the density-functional theory" and to John Pople "for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry." They enabled improved energy calculations on molecules and other multi-atom systems. Chemists have taken advantage of those developments to perform calculations on systems during reactive encounters, thereby obtaining a better understanding of chemical dynamics and allowing for predictions regarding the course of chemical reactions based on the energies of various possible transition states.