A happy Jewish family in dark days
Roald Hoffmann was born Roald Safran on July 18, 1937, in Złoczów, then in Poland and today Zolochiv in Ukraine. He was named after the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen. His father, Hillel Safran, was a civil engineer educated at the Lviv Polytechnic; his mother, Clara Rosen, was trained as a schoolteacher. He opens his Nobel autobiography with a single sentence that holds his whole childhood: he came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.
The war reached Złoczów in 1939, when the town came under Soviet occupation. In 1941 the German army arrived and, in Hoffmann’s words, darkness descended and the annihilation of Polish Jewry began. The family was forced into a ghetto and then a labour camp, where his father’s knowledge of local roads and buildings made him a valued prisoner.
Hidden in a schoolhouse attic
As prisoners were being sent to extermination camps, his father bribed guards and smuggled his wife and five-year-old son out of the camp early in 1943. A Ukrainian neighbour, Mykola Dyuk, hid them, along with several relatives, in the attic and a storeroom of a village schoolhouse, where they stayed until June 1944. His father remained in the camp and organized a plan to arm the prisoners for a breakout. It was discovered, and Hillel Safran was killed by the Nazis and their helpers in June 1943. Most of the rest of the family were murdered in the Holocaust.
In the attic his mother kept him alive in spirit as well as body. She taught him to read and had him memorize geography from old textbooks stored there, then quizzed him. He later described that time as being wrapped in a cocoon of love. When she learned of her husband’s death, she wrote down her grief in the notebook he had used for notes on a book about relativity. Roald, his mother and a handful of relatives survived and were freed by the Red Army in June 1944.
Displaced persons, then America
After the war they moved to Przemyśl and then to Kraków, where Roald finally went to school. His mother married Paul Hoffmann, who was, Roald wrote, a kind and gentle father to him, and the boy took his name. In 1946 the family left Poland for Czechoslovakia and then lived in displaced persons’ camps in Austria and Germany. On Washington’s Birthday in 1949 they arrived in the United States.
He learned English, his sixth language, quickly. After public schools in Brooklyn he went to Stuyvesant High School, one of New York’s selective science schools, graduating in 1955. At Columbia College he began as a premedical student, worked summers in government research laboratories, was captivated by literature and art history, and almost switched to art history. The poet and critic Mark Van Doren gave him his first real introduction to poetry.
Harvard, Moscow and a meeting with Woodward
Hoffmann began graduate work at Harvard in 1958. In the summer of 1959 he attended a quantum chemistry school in Sweden, where he met Eva Börjesson; they married the following year and spent a year in the Soviet Union, where he worked at Moscow University. Back at Harvard he worked with William Lipscomb, a future Nobel laureate, and with Lawrence Lohr programmed what became known as the extended Hückel method, an early computer technique for calculating the electronic structure of molecules. He received his doctorate in 1962 and spent three years as a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, where the organic chemist E. J. Corey showed him what was exciting in organic chemistry.
In the spring of 1964 Robert Burns Woodward, the greatest synthetic chemist of the age, asked him some questions about a puzzling class of reactions. That conversation began one of the most fruitful collaborations in modern chemistry. In 1965 Hoffmann moved to Cornell University, where he has remained ever since.
Predicting how reactions run
Chemical reactions are the rearrangement of electrons and atoms. For some important reactions, in which several bonds break and form at once, chemists had noticed strange patterns. The same starting molecule might give one product when heated and a different, mirror-related product when exposed to light, and certain reactions that looked perfectly reasonable on paper simply refused to happen. No one could explain why.
Woodward and Hoffmann showed that the answer lay in the symmetry of the electron orbitals, the regions where electrons are likely to be found, in the reacting molecules. If the orbitals of the starting materials could flow smoothly into those of the products while keeping their symmetry, the reaction was allowed; if not, it was forbidden or required a different path, for example activation by light instead of heat. Their principle, called the conservation of orbital symmetry and known to every chemist as the Woodward–Hoffmann rules, turned a set of mysteries into predictions. Kenichi Fukui in Japan had reached related insights independently through his theory of frontier orbitals.
The rules quickly became part of the basic toolkit of chemistry. The Swedish Academy said in 1981 that the theories of Fukui and Hoffmann were being used by chemists studying life processes and by chemists making new drugs, and that good theoretical models guide experimental researchers and save them time. Chemists planning the synthesis of complex molecules, such as natural products and medicines, still use them to decide which reactions will work and what shape of product they will give.
Chemistry for everyone
Hoffmann went on to apply simple, powerful orbital arguments to almost every kind of molecule, from carbon compounds to metal clusters and solids. In his Nobel lecture he introduced the isolobal analogy, a way of seeing deep similarities between organic and metal-containing fragments that helped unify the two halves of chemistry. Later he and his group studied extended solids, surfaces and the behaviour of matter under extreme pressure, and his book Solids and Surfaces tried, as he put it, to show chemists how simple the ideas of solid-state physics really are.
Yet he has always said that his main contribution is teaching. At Cornell he taught first-year general chemistry almost every year from 1966, as well as courses for non-scientists. He was the presenter of The World of Chemistry, a 26-part public television course that began airing in 1990, and since 2001 he has hosted Entertaining Science, a monthly evening of science and the arts at a café in New York. He writes poetry, essays and plays, including Oxygen, written with the chemist Carl Djerassi, and books such as The Same and Not the Same that explain chemistry to general readers.
Poetry came seriously in his late thirties. He began writing in the mid-1970s, published his first poem in 1984 and his first collection, The Metamict State, in 1987, followed by Gaps and Verges in 1990. He has argued that the language of science, straining to describe things that seem beyond words, is naturally poetic, and that scientists have no greater insight into the world than poets, only insight into carefully limited pieces of it. For him research, teaching and writing are the same act: using words as well as he can to understand the world and to share what he has learned.
Memory and Jewish identity
Hoffmann’s Jewish identity is bound up with survival and memory. He has written and spoken about the Holocaust, including in a play based on his family’s experience, Something That Belongs to You. In 2006 he returned to Zolochiv with his adult son and found the schoolhouse attic still intact; the storeroom where they had hidden had become, as he noted with irony, part of a chemistry classroom. In 2009 a monument to the town’s Holocaust victims was built on his initiative.
He describes himself as an atheist who is moved by religion. He and Eva have two children, Hillel Jan and Ingrid Helena. He sits on the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and in 2022 he joined other Nobel laureates in an open letter supporting Ukraine.
Honours and legacy
Hoffmann shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenichi Fukui for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions. Woodward, who had already won the 1965 chemistry prize for his syntheses, had died in 1979 and could not share it. Hoffmann has also received the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Priestley Medal of the American Chemical Society and more than 25 honorary degrees, and in 2023 the Carnegie Corporation of New York named him one of its Great Immigrants. He is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus at Cornell. In 1973 he and Woodward jointly received the American Chemical Society’s award in organic chemistry, and in 1982 he received its award in inorganic chemistry, a rare recognition across two branches of the science. A materials research institute in Shenzhen, China, was founded in his name in 2018.
His legacy runs in two directions. In chemistry, the Woodward–Hoffmann rules and his orbital pictures are taught to every chemistry student and used by researchers designing new medicines and materials. Beyond chemistry, he has spent a lifetime arguing that science is a deeply human, creative act, best shared with as many people as possible, a conviction that began in an attic where a mother taught her hidden child to read.
Sources & further reading
Roald Hoffmann, Biographical (autobiography), NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1981, NobelPrize.org · Roald Hoffmann, Jewish Virtual Library · Roald Hoffmann, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.