The science boom that followed World War II stimulated the then-young field of theoretical chemistry, which tries to predict the nature and behavior of molecules -- whether two compounds will interact to form a new kind of plastic, for example, or which parts of an enzyme are most important for the body to activate a hormone.
“And we’re still gaining insight into what’s really going on,” said Ruedenberg, a theoretical chemist at Iowa State University and one of the pioneers of the field. “We’re at the point where we can’t predict the best reaction [to make a particular product], but at least we can narrow it down quite a bit. And given a reaction, we can predict the properties of the product.”
Ruedenberg, professor emeritus since 1991, nevertheless still conducts research at both Iowa State and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory.
His contributions to the field over the course of his career are numerous. Ruedenberg's theories have described how a molecule's energy state, the three-dimensional arrangement of its electrons and other characteristics change as a reaction proceeds. He has also helped elucidate how and why bonds form between atoms.
Ruedenberg, a native of Germany, left his homeland as a teenager in 1938 and continued his studies in Switzerland. He studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Zurich, following his professor to the University of Chicago after the war.
In Chicago Ruedenberg worked with theoretical chemist R.S. Mulliken, who later received the Nobel Prize. “I remember how we discussed in the early fifties whether the new electronic computers -- which then had a memory of only 1024 words -- could be useful for our field,” said Ruedenberg. “By the middle fifties this was no longer a question.”
The ACS Award in Theoretical Chemistry is sponsored by IBM Corp.