I was born in New York City on February 14, 1917, the oldest child of Israel Hauptman and Leah Rosenfeld. I have two brothers, Manuel and Robert.

I married Edith Citrynell on November 10, 1940. We have two daughters, Barbara (1947) and Carol (1950).

My interest in most areas of science and mathematics began at an early age, as soon as I had learned to read, and continues to this day. I obtained the B.S. degree in mathematics from the City College of New York (1937) and the M.A. degree in mathematics from Columbia University (1939).

After the war I made the decision to obtain an advanced degree and pursue a career in basic scientific research. In furtherance of these goals I commenced a collaboration with Jerome Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. (1947) and at the same time enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland. The collaboration with Dr. Karle proved to be fruitful because his background in physical chemistry and mine in mathematics complemented each other nicely. Not only did this combination enable us to tackle head-on the phase problem of X-ray crystallography, but this work suggested also the topic of my doctoral dissertation, “An N-Dimensional Euclidean Algorithm”. By 1954 I had received my Ph.D. degree and Dr. Karle and I had laid the foundations of the direct methods in X-ray crystallography. Our 1953 monograph, “Solution of the Phase Problem I. The Centrosymmetric Crystal”, contains the main ideas, the most important of which was the introduction of probabilistic methods, in particular the joint probability distributions of several structure factors, as the essential tool for phase determination. In this monograph we introduced also the concepts of the structure invariants and seminvariants, special linear combinations of the phases, and used them to devise recipes for origin specification in all the centrosymmetric space groups. The extension to the non-centrosymmetric space groups was made some years later. The notion of the structure invariants and seminvariants proved to be of particular importance because they also serve to link the observed diffraction intensities with the needed phases of the structure factors.

In 1970 I joined the crystallographic group of the Medical Foundation of Buffalo* of which I was Research Director in 1972, replacing Dr. Dorita Norton. My work on the phase problem continues to this day. During the early years of this period I formulated the neighborhood principle and extension concept, the latter independently proposed by Giacovazzo under the term “representation theory”. These ideas laid the groundwork for the probabilistic theories of the higher order structure invariants and seminvariants which were further developed during the late seventies by myself and others. During the eighties I initiated work on the problem of combining the traditional techniques of direct methods with isomorphous replacement and anomalous dispersion in the attempt to facilitate the solution of macromolecular crystal structures. This work continues to the present time. More recently I have formulated the phase problem of X-ray crystallography as a minimal principle in the attempt to strengthen the existing direct methods techniques. Together with colleagues Charles Weeks, George DeTitta and others, we have made the initial applications with encouraging results.

*now Hauptman Woodward Medical Research Institute, Inc.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

Herbert A. Hauptman died on 23 October 2011.