In memoriam Hermann Hartmann, founder of TCA, on the occasion of his 100th birthday

Abstract

Hermann Hartmann was born on May 4, 1914, in Bischofsheim an der Rhon, about 130 km northeast of Frankfurt am Main. He received a classical education in a humanistic Gymnasium, where he excelled in ancient Greek and Latin. In 1933, he began studies in chemistry at the Institute of Technology and at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Among his teachers were the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld and the experimental isotope researcher Klaus Clusius. In 1939, he moved to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt to work on his thesis with the electrochemist Peter Wulff and, after being exempted from the draft because of illness, he completed his Ph.D. in 1941. He attained the Habilitatio in 1943, but he was appointed as ‘‘Privat-Dozent’’ and ‘‘Assistent’’ at the University of Frankfurt only in 1946. In 1951, he became a section leader at the Max Plank Institute for Physical Chemistry in Gottingen. In 1952, he returned to the University of Frankfurt as Director of the Institute for Physical Chemistry. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1982 and died on October 22, 1984. Upon coming to Frankfurt, Hartmann’s goal was to build up the institute into a center for experimental and theoretical studies that would be in the vanguard of modern physical chemistry and chemical physics in its full depth and breadth. His teaching covered classical physical chemistry and spectroscopy as well as statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics. A broad range of experimental investigations of structures and kinetics of condensed phases as well as of molecules in the gas phase was pursued with a broad range of spectroscopic techniques: X-ray, ultraviolet, visible, infrared, microwave, nuclear magnetic resonance, and ion-cyclotron resonance methods. Theoretical chemistry was however the discipline on which Hartmann had set his heart since the time that he had published a paper with Arnold Sommerfeld on the quantum mechanical rotor in 1940. His habilitation thesis (1943) was on chemical bonding in the context of Huckel theory. After becoming Dozent (1946), he developed a number of semi-empirical schemes for the description of chemical bonds. He made a notable impact (together with his first W. H. E. Schwarz (&) Chemistry Department, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China e-mail: Schwarz@chemie.uni-siegen.de