With a Little Help from My Friends: Forty Years of Fruitful Chemical Collaborations

Over the past 40 years, much of the author’s research, both computational and experimental, has involved collaborations. This Perspective describes some of the author’s collaborative research in eight different areas of organic and theoretical chemistry: (1) hydrocarbons containing unsaturatively, 1,3-bridged cyclobutane rings, (2) the use of orbital topology for predicting the ground states of diradicals, (3) violations of Hund’s rule, (4) the chemistry of phenylnitrenes, (5) tunneling by carbon in organic reactions, (6) the Cope rearrangement and the effect of substituents on it, (7) pyramidalized alkenes, dehydrocubanes, cubyl cation, and octanitrocubane, and (8) the effects of geminal fluorine substitution at C-2 of 1,3-diradicals. Highlighted in this Perspective are the synergism between calculations and experiments in the author’s research and the many different roles that serendipity has played in the collaborations that are described herein.