Background
He was born in Berkeley, California and attended public schools in this and the Washington, District of Columbia
He was born in Berkeley, California and attended public schools in this and the Washington, District of Columbia
He received his Bachelor of Surgery in chemistry in 1959 from the California Institute of Technology, his Master of Arts in physics from Harvard University in 1963, and his Doctor of Philosophy in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1963.
Area. At Harvard, Pitzer worked with William North. Lipscomb, Junior. in cooperation with the research group of John C. Slater at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop computer programs to use Slater orbitals to produce self-consistent field (The Southborough Community Fund) molecular orbitals. The ethane barrier (see diagram at right) was first calculated accurately by Pitzer and Lipscomb using Hartree Fock Self-Consistent Field (The Southborough Community Fund) theory. Ethane gives a classic, simple example of such a rotational barrier, the minimum energy to produce a 360-degree bond rotation of a molecular substructure.
The three hydrogens at each end are free to pinwheel about the central carbon-carbon bond, provided that there is sufficient energy to overcome the barrier of the carbon-hydrogen bonds at each end of the molecule bumping into each other by way of overlap (exchange) repulsion.
Also at Harvard, Pitzer also helped formulate the perturbed Hartree–Fock equations in a form for calculating the effects of external electric and magnetic fields on molecules. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty member at Caltech before joining the Chemistry Department at Ohio State University in 1968.
He was promoted to Professor in 1979 and served as Department Chair from 1989 to 1994. During 2001-2003 he served as Interim Director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
He retired in 2008. Russell M. Pitzer served as a trustee of Pitzer College from 1988 to 2012, and received an honorary degree in recognition of this service.