One of my scientific heroes: John R. Platt (1918-1992)

John R. Platt has featured on this blog before because of his paper in Science about "Strong Inference" and the "method of multiple alternative hypotheses". This stimulated my New Year's resolution.

Platt also wrote a really nice theory paper about organic dyes that will feature soon because Seth Olsen has a paper about to appear in Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation which gives a rigorous quantum chemical basis for Platt's theory.

I was wondering what happened to Platt and found an interesting 1992 Obituary in the New York Times.

I also found that Platt was on a panel discussion with Michael Polanyi about the interplay of reductionism and emergence in biology, physics, and chemistry.