Teaching

I have been enjoyably involved as a teacher throughout my career:

(i) as a regular supervisor of undergraduates and as a Director of Studies in Chemistry in my College for forty years;

(ii) in bringing 71 students through to PhDs, and guiding 32 postdoctoral co-workers in one or two years work from each (and 47 others);

(iii) as a visiting professor teaching introductory organic chemistry in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1980, and at Harvard in 1990; and

(iv) as the author of five textbooks. Spectroscopic Methods in Organic Chemistry, written with Dudley Williams, has sold over 100,000 copies in its various editions, and is now in its 5th; Spectroscopic Problems in Organic Chemistry, also compiled with Dudley Williams, was a companion volume to the Methods book; Selected Organic Syntheses has been much used and, although out of print, continues to be pirated by chemistry lecturers; Frontier Orbitals and Organic Chemical Reactions was an influential textbook, alerting the organic chemistry community, as well as students, to the usefulness and applicability of a non-mathematical understanding of molecular orbital theory in every day chemistry (this book, although over twenty-five years old, is still in print and still selling, a remarkable state of affairs for a scientific textbook; a new version is on its way); and Pericyclic Reactions is one of the Oxford Chemistry Primer series.