We talked about intelligence and wisdom in Roald Hoffmann’s office at Cornell, surrounded by carvings and masks, paintings, books, and poems. Molecular models were within reach, and he picked one up as we spoke. He was unmistakably a scientist. But in his company, I felt I was meeting a humanist and philosopher first, someone interested in what knowledge asks of us, and how we choose to live with it.
I photographed him in December 2025 at Baker Laboratory. Late afternoon light filled the office. His dry humor and patient explanations made it easy to keep asking questions. Our conversation moved between chemistry and the larger questions that had occupied him through a lifetime of research and writing.
Much of his scientific work concerns what happens when atoms rearrange themselves. Why does a reaction follow one path rather than another? Why can heat produce one result and light another? Working with Robert Burns Woodward, Roald helped show how the symmetry of electron orbitals governs an important class of reactions.
Orbitals describe the wave patterns of electrons in molecules. As bonds break and form, the ways those patterns connect help determine which rearrangements occur readily. Their rules gave chemists a way to predict outcomes that had seemed puzzling, including the shapes of the molecules they could make. Roald shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenichi Fukui, whose independently developed theories also explained the course of chemical reactions.
We walked next door into a small seminar room, where he picked up a piece of chalk. His hand trembled as he drew. He worked carefully, giving shape to ideas I could begin to follow. The wish to explain was evident in the care he took.
Roald was born in 1937 in Złoczów, then in Poland and now in Ukraine. He survived the Holocaust with his mother and relatives, sheltered by a Ukrainian family in a schoolhouse, initially in its attic. His father was killed. He arrived in the United States in 1949, aged eleven, and joined Cornell in 1965.
His poems and plays explore memory, human relationships, and moral responsibility. In The Same and Not the Same, he considers chemistry as an act of creation, with all the questions that follow from making something new. A molecule may be beautiful, useful, or dangerous. Understanding how to make it leaves open the question of what we should do with it.
These concerns felt close to the person I met. He could explain the behavior of electrons and remain absorbed by the uncertainties of human behavior. His interest in wisdom gave our conversation a depth that stayed with me.
Later, we stood beneath the great oak outside Baker Laboratory. Roald paused and looked up into the branches. I had spent the afternoon with someone whose discoveries helped chemists understand how matter changes. What I remember most is how readily our conversation returned to people, and to the harder question of what we do with what we know.
