"Inorganic Chemist" Ralph Pearson Hand Signed FDC Dated 1962 Todd Mueller COA

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"Inorganic Chemist" Ralph Pearson Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1962.
This item is authenticated by Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity.
ES-4065
Ralph Gottfrid Pearson
(born January 12, 1919,
Chicago
) is a physical
inorganic chemist
best known for the development of the concept of
hard and soft acids and bases
(HSAB). He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1943 from
Northwestern University
, and taught chemistry at Northwestern faculty from 1946 until 1976, when he moved to
University of California at Santa Barbara
(UCSB). He retired in 1989 but remains active in research in theoretical inorganic chemistry.
In 1963 he proposed the qualitative theory of
hard and soft acids and bases
(HSAB) in an attempt to unify the theories of reactivity in inorganic and organic chemistry. In this theory 'Hard' applies to species that are small, have high charge states, and are weakly
polarizable
. 'Soft' applies to species that are large, have low charge states and are strongly polarizable. Acids and bases interact, and the most stable interactions are hard-hard and soft-soft. In 1958 Pearson and
Fred Basolo
, his colleague at Northwestern wrote the influential monograph "Mechanisms of Inorganic Reactions", which integrated concepts from
ligand field theory
and
physical organic chemistry
and signaled a shift from descriptive
coordination chemistry
to a more quantitative science. With another Northwestern colleague, Arthur Atwater Frost, Pearson wrote in 1961 another classic text,
Kinetics and Mechanism: A Study of Homogeneous Chemical Reactions
(
ISBN
9780471283478
). A subsequent edition was with John W. Moore as co-author (
ISBN
978-0471035589
). In 1983 in collaboration with
Robert Parr
, he refined the HSAB theory into a quantitative method by calculating values of “absolute hardness” using
density functional theory
, an approximate method in molecular quantum mechanics. This concept of "absolute hardness" was later connected with the concept of (absolute)
electronegativity
.