John D. Roberts

I met the great John D. Roberts at Caltech for the first time in 1972. He seemed larger than life: a tall, handsome, rugged man with a shock of curly grey hair, broad warm grin, huge embracing handshake, and twinkle in his eye. This was the man who has inspired a generation of organic chemists by his intellectual leadership, his innovation in developing new techniques to explore mechanistic organic chemistry, his contributions to undergraduate and graduate education and the advancement of scientific societies.