Slater, John

Slater, John C., Introduction to Chemical Physics, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York (1939). 

Slater, John Clarke. "Directed Valence in Polyatomic Molecules." Physical Review 37 (1931) 481489. 

Slater, John G. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. Volume 8. George Allen Unwin, London. 1986. 

Quantum Theory of Matter, 2nd ed, John C, Slater, McGraw-Hill, New York 1968, p. 420, Fig. 21-2. 

This book has been written in an attempt to provide students with the mathematical basis of chemistry and physics. Many of the subjects chosen are those that I wish that I had known when I was a student It was just at that time that the no-mans-land between these two domains - chemistry and physics - was established by the Harvard School , certainly attributable to E. Bright Wilson, Jr., J. H. van Vleck and the others of that epoch. I was most honored to have been a product, at least indirectly, of that group as a graduate student of J. C. Decius. Later, in my post-doc years. I profited from the Harvard-MIT seminars. During this experience I listened to, and tried to understand, the presentations by those most prestigious persons, who played a very important role in my development in chemistry and physics. The essential books at that time were most certainly the many publications by John C. Slater and the Bible on mathematical methods, by Margeneau and Murphy. They were my inspirations. 

The classic HLSP-PP-VB (Heitler-London-Slater-Pauling perfect-pairing valence-bond) formalism and its chemical applications are described by L. Pauling, The Nature of the Chemical Bond. 3rd edn. (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1960 G. W. Wheland, The Theory of Resonance (New York, John Wiley, 1944) and H. Eyring, J. Walter, and G. E. Kimball, Quantum Chemistry (New York, John Wiley, 1944). 

Soon after the quantum revolution of the mid 1920s, Linus Pauling and John C. Slater expanded Lewis s localized electronic-structural concepts with the introduction of directed covalency in which bond directionality was achieved by the hybridization of atomic orbitals.1 For normal and hypovalent molecules, Pauling and Slater proposed that sp" hybrid orbitals are involved in forming shared-electron-pair bonds. Time has proven this proposal to be remarkably robust, as has been demonstrated by many examples in Chapter 3. 

I do not recall when I first heard of the Hohenberg-Kohn-Sham papers, but I do know that the quantum chemistry community at first paid little attention to them. In June of 1966 Lu Sham spoke about DFT at a Gordon Conference. But in those days, there was more discussion about another prescription that had been on the scene since 1951, the Slater Xa method. The Xa method was a well-defined, substantial improvement over the Thomas-Fermi method, a sensible approximation to exact Kohn-Sham. Debate over Xa went on for a number of years. Slater may never have recognized DFT as the major contribution to physics that it was. [When I asked John Connolly five or six years ago how he thought Slater had viewed DFT, he replied that he felt that Slater regarded it as obvious. ]... 

Robert S. Mulliken John Clarke Slater Charles Coulson... 

See S. S. Schweber, "The Young John Clarke Slater and the Development of Quantum Chemistry," HSPS 20 (1990) 339406, on 386. Schweber accepts the year 1927 as a "convenient birthdate for quantum chemistry"... 

Bom frequently showed less than high respect for chemical methods and theories, referring to the "arbitrary" "speculations" of chemists about valency and contrasting their ideas with the "idea of the atom as conceived by present-day physicists [which] is, in many vital respects, free from such arbitrariness." In a letter to John Slater in 1930, he unrepentantly hailed the ability of physicists to calculate binding energy for polyatomic molecules and "to establish the cases in which the valence theory of the chemist is reliable"[ ]8... 

John Slater later expressed regret, even anger, that Niels Bohr deterred him from the same path of reasoning while he was a postdoctoral fellow in Copenhagen in 1923. See Schweber (1990 351352). 

Schweber, "Young John Clarke Slater," on Slater as well as J. C. Slater, Solid State and Molecular Theory ... 

Quoted in Schweber (1990 373), from John Slater, "A Physicist of the Lucky Generation," MS, MIT Archives. 

John Slater, "The Self-Consistent Field and Structure of Atoms," Physical Review 32 (1928) 339348. See discussion in Schweber (1990 376377). 

John Slater, "Note on the Structure of the Groups X03," Physical Review 38 (1931) 325329 and "Molecular Energy Levels and Valence Bonds," Physical Review 38 (1931) 11091141. See Schweber, "Young John Clarke Slater," 388390. 

Schweber, "Young John Clarke Slater," 399, quoting from "The New Quantum Mechanics," Chemical Reviews 5 (1928) 467507. Also Aaron J. Ihde, Chemistry, as Viewed from Bascom s Hill A History of the Chemistry Department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (Madison University of Wisconsin Department of Chemistry, 1990) 165166. 

Schweber and others have argued that quantum chemistry was a quintessentially American discipline, with Mulliken, Slater, Van Vleck, Urey, Pauling, Edward Condon, Oppenheimer, Ralph Kronig, I. I. Rabi, Clarence Zener, David Dennison, Philip M. Morse, Eyring, John G. Kirkwood, George E. 

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