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A guide to help graduate students in the sciences cope with the greatest challenge of graduate school--conducting research.

Huizenga's career began on the Manhattan Project and continued at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), where in 1949, he and his colleagues initiated a major program to produce transplutonium nuclei by multiple neutron capture in reactors. Following the first thermonuclear explosion in 1952, Huizenga participated in the discovery of the elements einsteinium and fermium found in its debris. At ANL, he studied extensively the nuclear properties and systematics of actinide nuclei. In 1967, Huizenga moved to the University of Rochester, where he investigated the excited states of actinide nuclei by reaction spectroscopy and the decay modes of actinide muonic atoms. He also made detailed studies of the energy dissipation, nucleon transfer, and microscopic time-scale associated with a new heavy-ion reaction process known as "strongly damped collisions."--pub. desc.

Robert S. Mulliken, Nobel Laureate in chemistry, always had the intention to write a book about his field of research: molecular orbital theory. This is his scientific autobiography, edited posthumously by his former student Bernard J. Ransil and complemented with a memoir by Friedrich Hund, his scientific protagonist. Mulliken describes his career and gives an account of the contributions of his friends and colleagues at home and in Europe where he frequently travelled. And last but not least, he gives an accurate history of how the molecular orbital theory originated and how it evolved in an atmosphere of international exchange. The book is written in a particularly lively style, full of reminiscences and scientific facts, interwoven to produce an account of the Life of a Scientist.