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 Contributor Abstract 

Stephen F. Nelsen

   65th Birthday Symposium
Madison, Wisconsin
June 3-4, 2005

J. Michael McBride

Department of Chemistry, Yale University, Box 208107, New Haven, CT  06520-8107   j.mcbride@yale.edu

The Force Law(s) of Robert Hooke

Most of physical science depends on two force laws r^1 (Hooke), and 1/r^2 (Newton, Coulomb). Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was arguably the first professional experimental scientist. He asserted plausible claims to priority for both laws, much to the consternation of Issac Newton, seven years his junior. Part of Hooke's dizzying list of fundamental contributions across the spectrum of natural science is due his being in on the ground floor of the 17th Century scientific revolution, but even more it was due to his keen intuition and indefatigable work ethic. This talk will attempt to put Hooke's life and scientific contributions in context and to describe how he used geometry to attack problems for which Newton invented the calculus.

Biographical Sketch

A classmate of Steve Nelsen's in the P.D. Bartlett group at Harvard, Mike took the job at Yale that Steve declined when he came to Wisconsin. For many years he studied the mechanism of free-radical reactions in pure molecular crystals, but ultimately got into such complex problems that he shifted research emphasis to study whether there is a mechanism for growth and dissolution of molecular crystals. His current laboratory research uses atomic force microscopy and computer simulation to investigate these processes in situ. He has devoted significant time to studying how organic chemistry and crystallography have developed since the late 18th Century. Some of these topics have infiltrated his course of organic chemistry (see Chem125a).  

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