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Symmetry breaking, diradicals, and Coping with and Coping without Ernest Davidson

This paper describes a collaboration between Professor Ernest Davidson and the author, which began in 1976 and lasted until Ernest left the University of Washington in 1984. During those 9 years we co-authored a total of 34 papers that described the results of ab initio calculations on a variety of different types of organic molecules, These included anti-aromatic annulenes, carbanions, carbenes, conjugated radicals and radical cations, and non-Keklé hydrocarbon diradicals. Our collaboration led to insights about symmetry breaking, both real and artefactual, which formed the basis for a frequently-cited review article on this subject that we co-authored. However, our most often-referenced paper was concerned with predicting the sizes and signs of the singlet-triplet splittings in diradicals, based on whether or not the non-bonding Hückel molecular orbitals of a diradical can be chosen so that they are confined to disjoint sets of atoms. In 1984, we co-authored a paper on the Cope rearrangement. Since then, we have both continued to publish papers on this interesting reaction, but independently, rather than together. The results of the calculations that we each performed on the Cope rearrangement and how this reaction is affected by radical-stabilizing substituents are described. Our independent discoveries, that calculations beyond the CASSCF level are necessary in order to describe correctly the transition structure for the Cope rearrangement, led to our most recent joint publication, a 1996 review on the general importance of including dynamic correlation in ab initio calculations.