In trying to clean up my in-box of articles for potential posts, I write here about two articles for a more general audience, authored by two of the major leaders in computational organic chemistry.

Ken Houk offers an overview of how computational simulation is a partner with experiment and theory in aiding and guiding our understanding of organic chemistry.1 The article is written for the non-specialist, really even more for the non-scientist. Ken describes how computations have helped understand relatively simple reactions like pericyclic reactions, that then get more subtle when torquoselection is considered, to metal-catalysis, to designed protein catalysts. If you are ever faced with discussing just what you do as a computational chemist at a cocktail party, this article is a great resource of how to explain our science to the interested lay audience.

Paul Schleyer adds a tutorial on transition state aromaticity.2 The authors discusses a variety of aromaticity measures (energetics, geometry, magnetic properties) that can be employed to analyze the nature of transition states, in addition to ground state molecules. This article provides a very clear description of the methods and a few examples. It is written for a more specialized audience than Houk’s article, but is nonetheless completely accessible to any chemist, even those with no computational background.


(1) Houk, K. N.; Liu, P. "Using Computational Chemistry to Understand & Discover Chemical Reactions," Daedalus 2014, 143, 49-66, DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00305.

(2) Schleyer, P. v. R.; Wu, J. I.; Cossio, F. P.; Fernandez, I. "Aromaticity in transition structures," Chem. Soc. Rev. 2014, 43, 4909-4921, DOI: 10.1039/C4CS00012A.