Dear colleagues, I'm saddened to report the death of Clemens C.J. Roothaan, professor of Physics and Chemistry, who died on June 17. He was a Dutch physicist and chemist known for his development of the self-consistent field theory of molecular structure. Born in 1918 in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, he studied electrical engineering at TU Delft. During World War II he was held as a prisoner of war for his involvement in the Dutch Resistance. After completing his MA at Delft in 1945 he came to the United States to work on his PhD at the University of Chicago under the direction of Robert S. Mulliken. He was credited, by Mulliken in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, as having revolutionized Mulliken’s own work. Roothaan came to Chicago in 1949, finished his PhD in 1950, and joined the Physics Department, where he became Director of the University’s Computation Center. He also became Professor of Chemistry. He turned 100 in August of 2018, and lived nearly ten months after that.

-David Bevington, Prof. Emeritus and Co-Chair of the Emeriti Faculty Steering Committee

Read more about Professor Roothaan via UChicago News.