Henry Schaeffer III

Henry "Fritz" Schaefer III (born 1944) is a computational chemist.

He was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was educated in Syracuse, New York; Menlo Park, California; and East Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was awarded a B.S. degree in chemical physics by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966 and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Stanford University in 1969. He was professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley from 1969 to 1987. In 1979-1980 he was Wilfred T. Doherty Professor of Chemistry and inaugural Director of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas, Austin. In 1987 he moved to the University of Georgia, where he is Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry.

His contributions to the field of quantum chemistry include a pioneering paper challenging, on theoretical grounds, the geometry of triplet methylene as assigned by Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Gerhard Herzberg; the development of the Z-vector method simplifying certain calculations of correlated systems; and a wide body of work undertaken in his research group on the geometries, properties, and reactions of chemical systems using highly accurate ab initio quantum chemical techniques. Many of these papers have predicted, or forced a reinterpretation of, experimental results. A prodigious author, he has more than 1000 scientific publications, the majority appearing in the Journal of Chemical Physics or the Journal of the American Chemical Society. According to the Science Citation Index, during the period of 1981-1997, he was the sixth most highly cited chemist in the world.

He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He was awarded the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry in 1979 "for the development of computational quantum chemistry into a reliable quantitative field of chemistry and for prolific exemplary calculations of broad chemical interest".

He is known for signing the Dissent to Darwinism paper, and while from his writings it could be ascertained that he is a creationist, it is not clear if he adheres to a young earth or not.

Henry F. Shaefer is also known for his work "Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?" which is published answers to questions which are used for his seminars and discussions in different Universities over the world (ISBN 097429750X).


 * Henry "Fritz" Schaefer III, wiki biography on ResearchID.org

Генри Ф. Шефер