Sir John A. Pople was born in Burnham-on-Sea in England on October 31, 1925. He was educated Cambridge University studying under Sir J.E. Lennard-Jones and Charles A. Coulson receiving his doctorate in 1951. At the urging of fellow quantum chemist Robert Parr he emigrated to the U.S. in 1964 taking up a teaching position at Carnegie-Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, PA. Pople excelled at mathematics and his contributions to what came to be known as the Pariser-Parr-Pople (PPP) method made him a rising star in the field of computational chemistry. His increasing interest in the use of computers to further theoretical inquiries led to his co-authoring a predictive program known as Gaussian 70. Pople's work in this and successive versions of the Gaussian program were cited upon his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1998 an honor he shared with Walter Kohn creator of the density functional theory (DFT). For his contributions to chemistry Pople was knighted in 2003. He died in Chicago, IL on March 15. 2004.