- Person
- Herbert Hauptman
- Lived
- 1917–2011
- Field
- Mathematics, crystallography
- From
- American
The story
Herbert Hauptman was born in New York City in 1917 to a Jewish family, the son of a printer and a department store sales clerk. He studied mathematics at the City College of New York and Columbia University, served as a Navy weather officer in the Pacific during the Second World War, and in 1947 joined his former classmate Jerome Karle at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Karle was a physical chemist and Hauptman a mathematician, and they set out to solve the phase problem of X-ray crystallography: the measured pattern of X-ray spots from a crystal records their intensities but not the phases of the waves, and without phases the atoms cannot be located. Hauptman’s key contribution was to treat the problem with probability. The pair worked out joint probability distributions of the measured quantities and used them to estimate the most likely phases. They also introduced structure invariants and seminvariants, combinations of phases that link the observed intensities to the phases needed. Their 1953 monograph set out these ideas, which became the direct methods.
For years the work was met with scepticism and largely ignored. It gained acceptance in the 1970s, as computers made the calculations practical and Isabella Karle and others showed that they worked on real crystals, and in 1985 Hauptman and Karle shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In 1970 Hauptman moved to the Medical Foundation of Buffalo, later renamed the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in his honour. There he developed further theory and, from the 1980s, worked with colleagues to combine direct methods with other techniques and to apply them to much larger biological molecules such as proteins. He came to work every day into his nineties and died in 2011. The University at Buffalo said his work continues to have monumental implications for the design of therapeutic drugs.
Why it matters
The probabilistic direct methods Hauptman developed with Karle are built into crystallography software worldwide and help scientists determine the structures of new drugs and other molecules quickly.
About Herbert Hauptman
New York mathematician who, with Jerome Karle, solved the phase problem of X-ray crystallography, creating the direct methods now used routinely to reveal molecular structures. Nobel Prize 1985.
Sources
- Herbert A. Hauptman, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Obituary: Herbert A. Hauptman (1917–2011) American Crystallographic Association
- Hauptman obituary UB Reporter, University at Buffalo
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