Today is Prof. Richard Ernst’s birthday!

Prof. Ernst developed the Fourier Transform – all we need to do is type ‘efp’ or ‘wft’ and in less than a second – voila, there’s a beautiful NMR spectrum.  He also developed the 2D NMR – COSY and beyond.  I miss catching his presentation of the Laukien Prize at the annual Experimental NMR Conference.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.6.20180814a/full/

“Born on 14 August 1933 in Winterthur, Switzerland, Richard Ernst is a Nobel Prize–winning physical chemist… His doctoral thesis centered on the newly developing field of high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The following year he left Switzerland for the US to become a research scientist at Varian Associates in Palo Alto, California. There, he and a colleague worked to improve the sensitivity of NMR spectroscopy and developed Fourier transform NMR….In the 1970s he developed two-dimensional NMR techniques to study large molecules. He also expanded the application of NMR spectroscopy as a valuable tool in a number of fields besides chemistry, including physics, biology, and medicine. His work would lead to the development of magnetic resonance imaging, a noninvasive diagnostic imaging technology essential to medical professionals.”

 

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