In the course of preparing a literature meeting on post-Hartree–Fock computational methods last year, I found myself wishing that there was a quick and simple way to illustrate the relative error of different approximations on some familiar model reactions, like a "report card" for different levels of theory.

Who is Peter Thiel? Tyler Cowen calls him one of the most important public intellectuals of our era. Bloomberg called him responsible for the ideology of Silicon Valley “more than any other living Silicon Valley investor or entrepreneur.” Depending on who you ask, he’s either a shadowy plutocratic genius or a visionary forward-thinking genius: but everyone seems to at least agree that he’s a genius.

This is the second in what will hopefully become a series of blog posts (previously) focusing on the fascinating work of Dan Singleton (professor at Texas A&M).

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been transfixed, and saddened, by Eric Gilliam’s three-part series about the history of MIT (my alma mater).

Organic chemists often think in terms of potential energy surfaces, especially when plotting the results of a computational study.

Now that our work on screening for generality has finally been published in Nature, I wanted to first share a few personal reflections and then highlight the big conclusions that I gleaned from this project.

One common misconception in mechanistic organic chemistry is that reactions are accelerated by speeding up the rate-determining step.

The growing accessibility of computational chemistry has, unfortunately, led to a preponderance of papers with bad computations.

This is the first in what will hopefully become a series of blog posts focusing on the fascinating work of Dan Singleton (professor at Texas A&M).

As an undergraduate student in the sciences at MIT, contempt for management consulting was commonplace.

For many organic chemists, it’s hard to grasp the vast difference between various “fast” units of time.