Herbert Hauptman

Origins and early life

Herbert Aaron Hauptman was born in New York City on 14 February 1917, the eldest child of Israel Hauptman and Leah Rosenfeld, a Jewish family of the city. He went to Townsend Harris High School, took his degree at the City College of New York in 1937 and a master's in mathematics at Columbia in 1939, and after the war joined Jerome Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington while reading for a doctorate at the University of Maryland, which he completed in 1955.

Work and career

Their subject was the phase problem of X-ray crystallography. Shine X-rays through a crystal and the scattered beams record how strong each reflection is, but lose the phase — the information that says how the waves line up — and without it a structure had to be guessed at and then tested. Most crystallographers held the missing half irretrievable, and said as much about the work. Hauptman's answer was mathematical: electron density is never negative and is gathered into atoms, and those two constraints, handled by probability, tie the phases to the intensities tightly enough to recover them.

He and Karle set it out in 1953 in Solution of the Phase Problem I, and the direct methods that grew from it turned a structure determination from a career into a day's computation. They shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Later years

Hauptman joined the crystallographic group in Buffalo in 1970, became its research director in 1972, and led the institute that now carries his name until his death there on 23 October 2011.