The Pauling Blog

I was delighted to get a request today to link to a blog about a very special person indeed, Linus Pauling:

The Pauling Blog is run by the Oregon State University Special Collections staff.  It is devoted to informing the public of our various holdings, most notably the Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Papers.  We post a minimum of twice weekly on Pauling’s life and work, often focusing on his contributions to the field of chemistry.  We also post on his work in physics, biology, and medicine.

[…]

Please feel free to visit the Pauling Blog (http://paulingblog.wordpress.com) or contact us with any questions you may have.  […] you may be especially interested in Linus Pauling: The Nature of the Chemical Bond, a documentary history website hosted on the OSU Special Collections homepage (http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/).

There can be no doubt that Pauling was the “chemist of the twentieth century” – he covered so many fields and was influential in all he touched. I had the privilege to meet him in 1984 (I think) and listen to him talk – in this case not about DNA or strontium or proteins but about minerals – the area where he started. In fact his thesis at Caltech was simply 5 papers in JACS on mineral crystal structures – which at that time were great intellectual feats. I was also presenting my own ideas on the automated analysis of crystal structures and he gave me interested attention.

I’ve blogged about him on a few occasions, but mention here

Impact Factors! Hirsch, Erdős and Pauling

where I suggest I suggest that after the success of the Erdős number in mathematics we could generate a Pauling number in chemistry.

And finally a personal connection – Catherine Murray-Rust was in the library at the time that the Pauling collection was being compiled.

This is an inspiration to us all.