Jerry Karle died a couple of weeks ago, and one of us here learned about it by noticing his obituary in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/health/jerome-karle-94-dies-nobelist-for-c... He's well known to those of us who started in this field when the solving of a Patterson function for a heavy atom in a structure was the only way we knew to get the structure. With Herb Hauptman, and in close teamwork with his wife Isabella who actually >did< crystallography, he played a major role in working out the sort of Direct Methods that allowed one to solve ordinary small-molecule structures before the days of high-speed computing. As the obituary points out, Jerry and Herb shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. The obit. is worth reading. I suspect you'll see an even better one in Nature soon. My own tiny personal memory of Jerry Karle: When I was a grad student at the Univ. of Wisc. with Larry Dahl I made a pilgrimage to the NRL to visit Jerry and Isabella. I was trying to use direct methods to solve at least one cephalosporin structure, which eventually appeared in my thesis, and there was a feature of DM that I failed to understand. They were very patient with me, but couldn't understand what it was I didn't get. It turns out to have been essentially trivial, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Anyway he always recognized me afterwards, or pretended to. I was delighted on arriving at BNL to discover that his daughter Louise was here. Bob ========================================================================= Robert M. Sweet E-Dress: [email protected] Group Leader, PXRR: Macromolecular ^ (that's L Crystallography Research Resource at NSLS not 1) http://px.nsls.bnl.gov/ Photon Sciences and Biosciences Dept Office and mail, Bldg 745, a.k.a. LOB-5 Brookhaven Nat'l Lab. Phones: Upton, NY 11973 631 344 3401 (Office) U.S.A. 631 344 2741 (Facsimile) =========================================================================