Rudolf Zahradník (1928–2020)
The pioneering quantum chemist and founding president of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Learned Society of the Czech Republic, Rudolf Zahradník, died on 31 October 2020 in Prague.
Joining forces with Jaroslav Koutecký, Zahradník laid the foundations in the 1950s and 1960s of what is known as the Prague school of quantum chemistry. Despite Koutecký and his key associates, Joe Paldus and Jiří Čížek, emigrating in the aftermath of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Prague school continued to prosper throughout the politically and materially adverse 1970s and 1980s. In the wake of the Velvet Revolution, Zahradník was elected director of the Heyrovský Institute in 1990. The list of problems tackled by Zahradník and his circle of students and collaborators included the electronic structure and spectra of alternant and non-alternant hydrocarbons, the structure and properties of open-shell systems, weak molecule–molecule interactions, catalysis, interactions of biomolecules and ion–molecule reactions. Charles Coulson’s plea to theorists to ‘give us insight, not numbers!’ might have as well come from Zahradník.