Chemical Methods

by Reinhard W. Hoffmann (Author)
The structures of many natural products are given in standard textbooks on organic chemistry as 'established facts'. Yet for those natural products whose structures were determined between 1860 and 1960 by classical chemical methods, the lines of evidence are frequently buried under any number of investigations that led to dead ends and to revised structure assignments.

The use of quantum chemistry for the quantitative prediction of molecular properties has long been frustrated by the technical difficulty of carrying out the needed computations. In the last decade there have been substantial advances in the formalism and computer hardware needed to carry out accurate calculations of molecular properties efficiently.