Having laid the scientific foundations for the sphere, Dr. Pope wrote, with Charles E. Swenberg, the definitive textual content “Digital Processes in Natural Crystals and Polymers.” First printed in 1982, the e-book of greater than 1,300 pages stays the principal reference within the area of natural semiconductors.
Dr. Pope, who targeted on primary analysis, held few patents and didn’t search to revenue from his discoveries.
In 2006, the Royal Society awarded Dr. Pope the Davy Medal, given yearly to a scientist whose analysis helped result in extraordinary advances in any area of chemistry. A number of individuals who have constructed on Dr. Pope’s work have received Nobel Prizes. In 2000, the prize in chemistry was awarded collectively to Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa for inventing a way for making plastic conduct electrical energy.
“In a way, Martin Pope’s work was a prelude to all that,” Sir John Meurig Thomas, an emeritus professor of chemistry on the College of Cambridge, stated in an interview in 2011. (He died in 2020.)
Martin Pope was born Isidore Poppick on Aug. 22, 1918, in a tenement on the Decrease East Facet of Manhattan. His mother and father, Phillip and Anna, have been each Jewish immigrants who had come to New York from Poland as youngsters. His father labored as a laborer in a fur store, stretching animal skins.
“We have been fully depending on whether or not occasions have been adequate for folks to purchase fur coats,” Dr. Pope stated within the 2011 interview.
In 1938, as an undergraduate on the Metropolis School of New York learning bodily chemistry, the 20-year-old Isidore Poppick printed a analysis paper within the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society.