Wilson, E. Bright

Pauling, Linus and Wilson, E. Bright Jr., Introduction to Quantum Mechanics McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York (1935). Republished by Dover Publications, Mineola, New York, (1985). 

E Bright Wilson Jr, JC Deems, PC Cross. Molecular Vibrations The Theory of Infrared and Raman Vibrational Spectra. New York McGraw-Hill, 1955. 

E. Bright Wilson, Jr., Department of Chemistry, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts... 

Reprinted from Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, with Application to Chemistry, by Linus Pauling and E. Bright Wilson, Jr., McGraw Hill, NY, Section 42, pp. 326-331 (1935). 

Photo 10 Linus Pauling delivering the Richards Medal Address at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947. At the left is Prof. E. Bright Wilson, Jr., who in the 1930 s collaborated with Pauling in writing Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (see SP 15), a book that is still used in teaching quantum mechanics to chemists. 

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. 

According to the Hohenberg-Kohn theorem of the density functional theory, the ground-state electron density determines all molecular properties. E. Bright Wilson [46] noticed that Kato s theorem [47,48] provides an explicit procedure for constructing the Hamiltonian of a Coulomb system from the electron density ... 

F. Weinhold and E. Bright Wilson, Jr., Reduced density matrices of atoms and molecules. 11. On the V-representability problem. J. Chem. Phys. 47, 2298 (1967). 

Smyth T., R. W. Dornte and E. Bright Wilson jr. Electric Moment and... 

The contributions of Erich Hiickel to the development of molecular orbital theory have already been mentioned in the subsection on Germany (Section 5.4.1) the development of semi-empirical quantum mechanical treatments in organic chemistry by M. J. S. Dewar has been discussed in Section 5.5. In the early development of the application of quantum mechanics to chemistry, Linus Pauling (1901-1994)359 was pre-eminent. He was associated with CalTech for most of his career. His work before World War II generated two influential books the Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (with E. Bright Wilson, 1935)360 and The Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939).361 He favoured the valence-bond treatment and the theory of resonance. 

INTRODUCTION TO QUANTUM MECHANICS With Applications to Chemistry, Linus Pauling E. Bright Wilson, Jr. Classic undergraduate text by Nobel Prize winner applies quantum mechanics to chemical and physical problems. Numerous tables and figures enhance the text. Chapter bibliographies. Appendices. Index. 468pp. 5X 8X. 64871-0 Pa. 9.95... 

Before going on to survey more recent calculations of a, it is appropriate to recognize the contribution Pauling made to this discipline in the textbook[12] which he co-authored with E. Bright Wilson, Jr., published in 1935. It is still in print in its original edition. Though the preface would not now be considered politically correct, this treatise remains a mine of information. It is particularly relevant in the attention it pays to the more accurate and non-empirical calculations which were made of a(He) during the period 1927-35. 

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