Peter Knowles

Time to stop mentioning alkyl group inductive effects New computational evidence reiterates that alkyl groups are inductively electron-withdrawing and that hyperconjugation dominates

Have inductive effects been keeping you awake at night? Cue my first @chemistryworld.bsky.social article for 2025! Many congratulations to @markelliottcardiff.bsky.social and colleagues in Cardiff and thank you to Jen Newton for her editing prowess. #ChemSky

www.chemistryworld.com/news/time-to...

Alkyl inductive effects: Confusion in textbooks Cardiff chemists say students are being misled

Our work on alkyl inductive effects is discussed in C&E News: cen.acs.org/education/k1... #compchem

IBM 370/165 and Cray-1S (so much memory! pipeline for vectors!) in 1st week of PhD

The FORmula TRANslating system is aging well.

Happy 70th birthday, Fortran! 🧪

Ahlrichs war Quantenchemiker und hatte in seiner Arbeitsgruppe hoch anerkannte Berechnungsprogramme für molekulare Strukturen entwickelt. Er war groß gewachsen, selbstbewusst und hinterfragte wissenschaftliche Aussagen ebenso wie gesellschaftliche Zustände auf eine unbekümmerte Art und Weise. Gespräche mit ihm waren immer anregend. Gleiches galt für Professor Nick Handy aus Cambridge (GB). Dank seines britischen Humors konnte er bereits mit seinen Fragen das DDR-System ad absurdum führen. Als ich in den 1990er Jahren Frauenministerin war, lud er mich an sein College ein, um dort zu den Studenten über mein Leben in der DDR und die Deutsche Einheit zu sprechen.

#CompChem in den Merkel-Erinnerungen

#compchem #theochem

Alkyl groups in organic molecules are NOT inductively electron-releasing It is commonly stated that alkyl groups exert an inductive electron-releasing effect when compared to hydrogen. This information has been given in numerous organic chemistry textbooks over the last 75...

First post on here for #chemsky you’ve always been told that alkyl groups are inductively electron donating. I’m afraid that’s not actually true! There’s a fair bit of evidence that they are electron withdrawing and we’ve just added to that!

pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...