Isaiah Shavitt

Isaiah Shavitt is a Polish-born theoretical chemist.

He was born on July 29, 1925 in Kutno, Poland. He was awarded a Ph. D., supervised by S. Francis Boys at Cambridge University, in 1957. He was a professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel from 1962 to 1967. In 1967 he moved to a senior research position at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, United States. In 1968 he also became a part-time faculty member at the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State University and moved there full-time in 1981. In 1994 he retired from this position and continued part-time as an Emeritus Professor. He is now an Adjunct Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Shavitt's landmark achievements include being responsible for two of the first applications of the then newly available computer to chemistry, developing the Gaussian transforn method for calculating multicenter integrals of Slater-type orbitals, and the first proposal of contracted Gaussians as basis orbitals.

He is one of the authors of the COLUMBUS ab initio computational chemistry programs.

An International Conference, entitled "Molecular Quantum Mechanics: Methods and Applications" was held in memory of S. Francis Boys and in honour of Isaiah Shavitt in September, 1995 at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

Isaiah Shavitt died at the age of 87 on Dec. 8, 2012 at Carle Foundation Hospital, Urbana.