Who are the guys* at the top of the page?

From left to right:

• Robert Woodward (1917-1979) – co-developed Woodward-Hoffmann rules. Nobel 1965 Wikipedia (for a much more revealing portrait, read J.I. Seeman, “R.B. Woodward: A Larger-than-Life Chemistry Rock Star”, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Eng., 2017, 56, 10228, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201702635)
• Arthur Cope (1909-1966) – developed the Cope rearrangement. Wikipedia
• Erich Hückel (1896-1980) – developed the Hückel MO method and Hückel’s Rule for aromaticity. Wikipedia
• Kenichi Fukui (1918-1998) – developed Frontier MO theory. Nobel 1981 Wikipedia
• Michael J. S. Dewar (1918-1997) – developed the “aromatic” transition state concept. Wikipedia
• Roald Hoffmann (b. 1937) – co-developed Woodward-Hoffmann rules. Nobel 1981 Wikipedia

*Yes, they are all guys, but they are a surprisingly heterogeneous bunch for the time period when they did the work that interests us (1930’s to 1970’s). The scientists shown above operated across racial, national, linguistic, and religious boundaries. Pretty impressive. Needless to say, a photo gallery of scientists currently active in the fields of physical organic, theoretical, and computational, chemistry, would be far more diverse. In the end, chemistry should be for, and by, everyone.

Added 6/2/10: I recently “discovered” a very short article in C&ENews (S. Wilkinson, “Symmetry Rules!” January 27, 2003, 81(4), 59) celebrating the publication of the original Woodward-Hoffmann article in 1965. The article is nice to look at because it contains a link to the first W-H article and also photos of both men that were taken around the time when the Rules were published. Hard to believe that they were both younger than I am now (and Hoffmann was much, much closer to your age than to mine).