Paul von Ragué Schleyer was an American organic physical chemist of substantial significance whose research is cited with great frequency.
Education
Born on February 27, 1930 in Cleveland, Ohio, Schleyer graduated as the Valedictorian from his class at Cleveland West Technical High School in 1947. Schleyer received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University in 1951 Magna Cum Laude. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Harvard University in 1957, having studied under Paul Doughty Bartlett.
Career
A 1997 survey indicated that Doctor Schleyer was, at the time, the world"s third most cited chemist, with over 1100 technical papers produced. He was Higgins Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, Professor and co-director of the Institute for Organic Chemistry (Institut für organische Chemie) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, and later Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. He had published twelve books in the fields of lithium chemistry, ab initio molecular orbital theory and carbonium ions.
He was past president of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists, a fellow of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and Editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Computational Chemistry.
Schleyer began teaching at Princeton in 1954 and became Higgins Professor of Chemistry there. While at Princeton, Schleyer married Inga Venema in 1969.
At Princeton he was always present in his combination laboratory/office until late in the evening, available to help his students untangle problems with experiments, as he tirelessly worked on his own research amid uncountable stacks of manuscripts and books
Membership
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.