Noble Prize 2013
Jacob Thomas, Danielle Song, Sidda Harsha
"for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems"
Who won?
Martin Karplus
Born: March 15, 1930
Place of Birth: Vienna, Austria
College: California Institute of Technology (1950-1953) and Harvard University (1947-1950).Place of Work: Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory
Field: Physical Chemistry
Fun Fact: He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2000.
Michael Levitt
Born: May 9, 1947
Place of Birth: Pretoria, South Africa
Place of Work: Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford
Field: Computational Structural Biology
Fun Fact: He is an American, British, and Israeli citizen.
Arieh Warshel
Born: November 20, 1940
Place of Birth: Kibbutz Sde Nahum, Mandatory Palestine
Place of Work: Biophysicist
Field: Chemistry, Biochemistry, Biophysics
Fun Fact: He fought in the Six Day War and the Yum Kippur War.
What did they do?
- Created powerful programs on the computer that predicts chemical processes.
- The computers are so accurate that they can predict the results of traditional experiments too.
- Before, it was necessary to use quantum physics to predict these results, but this new advancement allowed chemical processes to be predicted for the first time without all the extra work that using quantum physics required.
Why did they win?
- They allowed scientists to view chemical processes that could not be seen using classical chemistry processes.
- It is groundbreaking because it managed to make Newton’s classical physics work side-by-side with the fundamentally different quantum physics.