Molecular Origami: Precision Scale Models from Paper - Softcover

This is a fun, hands-on guide to understanding the basic structure and chemistry of matter. Drawing on the Japanese art of paperfolding, the book provides rip-out patterns for 124 molecules, along with easy instructions for folding them into scale models, many of which are three-dimensional. The molecules progress from simple ones like methane to more exotic structures such as quartz and buckminsterfullerenes. Questions and discussions are included.

"Who will use this book? Any chemist who is young at heart might like to snip, fold, and glue, and in doing so might well come away with a deeper knowledge of the bricks of their trade. Any teacher should be able to use them as an aid to teaching, at all levels ... Anything that renders chemistry less abstract, more tangible, is to be welcomed, and this unassuming, engaging publication deserves to be well received." P. W. Atkins, THES

Robert Hanson is a Professor of Chemistry at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota, where he has been teaching since 1986. Trained as an organic chemist with Gilbert Stork at Columbia University, he shares a patent with 2001 Nobel Prize winner K.Barry Sharpless for the asymmetric epoxidation of allylic alcohols. His interest in thermodynamics goes back to early training at the California Institute of Technology, from which he got a B.S. degree in 1979. He spends his occasional moments of free time playing the violin in a community orchestra, piloting gliders, and designing new Sudoku strategies.