Boulder Conference

In my opinion, the last qualitative change in theoretical chemistry corresponds to the introduction of computers in chemistry. A conventional date for the beginning of this last period may be indicated in the Boulder Conference of 1959 [2], i.e. more than thirty years ago. The use of more and more large and efficient computers has shifted the attention of theoretical chemists to an extensive use of quantum mechanical calculations. 

A. J. Coleman, A-representabihty circunvented, in Energy, Structure and Reactivity—Boulder Conference (D.W Smith and W. McRae, eds.), John Wiley Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 1973. 

K. Ruedenberg, R.C. Raffenetti and R. Bardo, 1973, in Energy, Structure and Reactivity, Proceedings of the 1972 Boulder Conference on Theoretical Chemistry, Wiley, New York... 

L. Zuppiroli, H. Mutka, and S. Bouffard, Boulder Conference, Saclay, France, Sept. 9, 1980. 

In a famous after dinner speech delivered at the Boulder Conference in 1959, the leading British Theoretical Chemist of the day, Professor Charles A. Coulson, predicted that... 

The Foster and Boys calculation took place at a pivotal point in the evolution of computational chemistry. At this time many were not sure how or whether the discipline would develop. There was a significant philosophical gap between theoreticians who preferred to use empirical calculations to understand chemical systems qualitatively and those who wanted to use computers to perform accurate calculations. Coulson [8] called the first group a posteriori-ists and the second ab initio-ists. A few excerpts from Coulson s comments [8] given in an after dinner talk at the Boulder conference where Foster and Boys presented their work on CH2 are representative. 

In 1959, the year in which the Boulder Conference was convened, after years of intense networking among members of the quantum chemical community, Daudel, together with two colleagues from the Centre de Mecanique Ondulatoire Appliqu e, published a textbook titled Quantum Chemistry, instead of Theoretical Chemistry for which he opted when writing his first textbook co-authored with Poitiers (Daudel, Lefebvre, and Moser 1959). Locally, things had matured, but the textbook was addressed to an international audience rather insensitive to the constraints of the local... 

A different way of looking at these problems was exemplified by Coulson s intervention at the Nikko Symposium, in which he contrasted the "easy" with the "hard" methods in doing quantum chemistry, and which followed smoothly his many considerations steadfastly voiced since the time he became the Rouse Ball Professor of Applied Mathematics at Oxford in 1951 (figure 4.3), and which culminated in the after-dinner address at the 1959 Boulder Conference. More than anyone else he was a stubborn and committed advocate of methodological pluralism, of the possibilities for exploring different approaches in different problems, always eager to compare and... 

A certain scepticism, perhaps not quite as marked as in the quote above, also found its place in Coulson s after-dinner speech entitled The Present State of Molecular Structure Calculations, [Coulson, I960], made at the Boulder Conference in 1959. He said there ... 

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