18 April 1997
Dear Dr.Smith
  I've read your closely spaced proposal with interest.
I think you have good command of the literature of chemistry
and also a feeling for design and a mathematical treatment
of it that many chemists lack. So getting together with a 
good synthetric group (because there are light years between 
writing a molecular structure and making it...)
is the ideal way to proceed. You would have a great team.
--Roald Hoffmann
Cornell University dept. of chemistry,
Baker Lab
Ithaca NY 14853-1301 USA

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[Hoffmann was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry, jointly
with Kenichi Fukui, for "their theories, developed independently,
governing the course of chemical reactions."  Hoffmann is writing
here about my (Warren D. Smith's) paper on "molecular tinkertoys"
available online as #34 at 
    http://www.math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html.
I totally agree with Hoffmann that the next stage is to get 
synthetic chemists involved.  However, as Hoffmann also once 
remarked, there can be a large inter-field psychological
"potential barrier" making that difficult...  frustrating example: 
I was offered a part-time visiting position/collaboration 
opportunity on that by the Princeton Univ. Dept. of Chemistry - 
apparently surmounting the potential barrier! - but then my 
employer at the time, NEC Research Institute, unfortunately 
prevented me from accepting.]