Frisch Harry

The importance of geometry in understanding molecular structure was illustrated long ago by the pioneering work of Louis Pasteur, Achille Joseph Le Bel, and Jacobus Henricus van t Hoff. However, it was only after Harry L. Frisch and Edel Wasserman s now classic paper,4 a century later, that the topology of molecular structures is also being considered to be significant. 

We bet every reader of ours have been annoyed — and perhaps more than once — by a rope, or a thread, or a fishing line tangling and knotting out of control. Does not this also happen to molecular ropes — polymer chains Do they spontaneously knot This question was first asked by Max Delbriick (1906-1981) in the DNA context in 1962 and, independently, by Harry Frisch (1928-2007) and E.Wasserman for regular polymers in 1961. In this chapter, we will discuss what is known about knots in polymers, but first we have to digress into the exciting history of the subject. 

The work by Tait jump-started the mathematics of knots. But as far as physics is concerned, knots went largely off the physics horizon for almost a century, until Max Delbriick and Harry Frisch, in the beginning of 1960s, revived the interest in knots in a completely new context of polymers and biopolymers. 

Vice President Harry S. Truman of Independence, Missouri, who knew only the bare fact of the Manhattan Project s existence, said later that when he heard from Eleanor Roosevelt that he must assume the Presidency in Franklin Roosevelt s place, I kept thinking. The lightning has struck. The lightning has struck Between the Thursday of Roosevelt s death and the Sunday of the memorial service on the Hill, Otto Frisch delivered to Robert Oppenheimer his report on the first experimental determination of the critical mass of pure U235. Little Boy needed more than one critical mass, but the fulfillment of that requirement was now only a matter of time. The lightning had struck at Los Alamos as well. 

Harry L. Frisch Department of Chemistry, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222, hlf04 albany. Edu... 

I wish to thank Dr. Kurt C. Frisch, Dr. Harry L. Frisch, Dr. Daniel Klempner, and Dr. Yuri S. Lipatov, among many others, for their help in preparing this book. If not for their researches, the field of IPNs would be much diminished. My collaborators at Lehigh University, Dr. David A. Thomas and Dr. John A. Manson, provided many of the ideas, as well as results, that are incorporated in this book. My students, too numerous to... 

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