R&D News: 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to...

Quick note to myself: Yesterday was a great day!

The 2013 Nobel Prize was awarded to three professors: Professor Martin Karplus, of the University and Strasbourg and Havard University, professor Michael Levitt, of Stanford University, and professor Arieh Warshel, of the University of Southern California.

This is great for several reasons:

Firstly, USC is my Alma mater. USC now has 4 Nobel Prize holders over its life time and two over just the last 20 or so years! So go Trojans!

Secondly, this is the first time I am aware of that a Nobel Prize went to a computational science related field for being able to merge quantum- and Newtonian-physics model into one coherent computer model enabling researchers to understand how chemical reactions happen in molecules of different complexities. I think this underlines the increasing importance that computers play in solving increasingly complicated problems.

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