Old notices
These pages collect together notices posted on the IUCr web site in past years. They are retained for archival interest, but there is no guarantee (or likelihood) that many of the web links found in these notices will still be active.
Jack D. Dunitz (1923–2021)
We are sad to report the death of Jack Dunitz, Professor Emeritus at ETH-Zürich, Switzerland, at the age of 98. Professor Dunitz was widely valued as an insightful scientist, an inspirational teacher and a witty raconteur, who shaped the development of modern crystallography over more than 70 years.
Jack Dunitz studied chemistry at Glasgow University, UK (PhD 1947), and held research fellowships at Oxford University, UK (1946–1948, 1951–1953); the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA (1948–1951, 1953–1954); the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA (1954–1955); and the Royal Institution, London, UK (1956–1957). An account of his experiences at these institutions can be read here. In 1957, he took up the position of Professor of Chemical Crystallography at ETH-Zürich, a post that he held until his retirement in 1990.
Dunitz's research involved the use of crystal structure analysis as tool for studying chemical problems, e.g. structure and reactivity of medium-ring compounds, ion specificity of natural and synthetic ionophores, chemical reaction paths, molecular motions, electron-density distributions, polymorphism, phase transformations in solids, solid-state chemical reactions and analysis of weak intermolecular interactions in condensed phases. More recent work focussed on problems of polymorphism, phase transformations in solids and solid-state chemical reactions, analysis of weak intermolecular interactions in condensed phases, virtual crystallography and crystal structure prediction.
Among his many honours are the Paracelsus Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society (1986), the Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1990) and the Buerger Award of the American Crystallographic Association (1991).
Dunitz wrote more than 350 scientific papers, nearly a third of which appeared in IUCr journals from 1949 (in Acta Crystallographica) to 2015 (in IUCrJ). He is the author of the classic book X-Ray Analysis and the Structure of Organic Molecules and the co-author, with Edgar Heilbronner, of Reflections on Symmetry in Chemistry.... and Elsewhere.
Read more here. A full obituary will be published in due course.
