Abstract: Scientific ideas can take a long time to gestate, and their fusion sometimes emerges from the most unexpected of directions. The talk will illustrate a chemist’s attempt to merge ideas from different areas of mathematics, molecular biology, physics and indeed chemistry, and which together span some 314 years of scientific (and indeed musical) development. The central theme concerns twisted objects known as Mobius bands, their molecular analogues, and the consequences of exploring what happens when additional twists are added. The talk will also address the theme of how to express the emerging three dimensional concepts in a visually comprehensible and semantically harvestable manner suitable for both a (re-invention) of the scientific journal for an Internet era, and in presentations to an audience, with the help of some scissors, paper and hopefully the audience itself.

Biography: Born in London in 1950, Professor Rzepa completed a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry in 1974, involving the synthesis and kinetic study of a class of molecule known as indoles. Following a period at the University of Texas at Austin involving exposure to the then newly emerging field of computational organic chemistry, Rzepa returned to Imperial College in 1977. Here his group has continued to develop the application of quantum chemical methods to studying the fundamental origins of chemical structure, molecular properties and reaction mechanisms, as exemplified by recent explorations into the origins of chiral aromaticities and the factors controlling metal-mediated reactions and polymerisations.From the mid 1980s the germ of an idea started to develop that the then nascent Internet had the potential to radically evolve the very nature of scientific communication and publishing in molecular sciences. By 2009, the fruits of this germination can be routinely found embedded in many an online journal article and integrated into teaching lecture materials.

In the Chair: Professor Tom Welton, Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London

Vote of thanks: Dr Henry F Schaefer III, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director, Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry, Unviersity of Georgia