Polish-American Nobel Prize chemist (1981) at Cornell who also writes poetry and essays about the intersection of science and the humanities — exploring the aesthetic dimensions of chemistry and the humanistic dimensions of scientific practice.
Demonstrates that the great chemist and the poet can coexist — Hoffmann's essays on chemistry show the aesthetic pleasure of molecular structure, the narrative coherence of chemical reactions, and the genuine analogies between scientific explanation and artistic expression — modeling a wholeness that refuses the science/humanities split.
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