Robert Burns Woodward

Robert Burns Woodward was born April 10, 1917, and spent his career dismantling the assumption that nature's most tangled molecules were beyond human reach. His syntheses of complex natural products redrew the map of what organic chemistry could do, each one a proof that architecture and logic could substitute for accident. He worked closely with Roald Hoffmann on theoretical studies of chemical reactions, marrying the physical and the practical. In 1965 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He died July 8, 1979, having made synthetic organic chemistry a different discipline than the one he entered.