Gershom (Jan M.L.) Martin

It happened like a bolt out of the blue—or, as it is said in my mother tongue, “like a thunderclap under a bright blue sky”. My longtime friend, collaborator, and leading light of quantum chemistry, John F. Stanton, was suddenly taken from us yesterday (March 21, 2025) at noon Mountain Time at the home of his longtime collaborator G. Barney Ellison in Boulder, Colorado.

 

John was born in 1961 in Japan, where his father, a career U.S. diplomat, was posted at the time. He spent much of his formative years in Cherry Hill, New Jersey —whence his father commuted to the State Department in DC — and summers in rural Minnesota at a farm owned by relatives. He spoke often about the contrasts between these two environments, and how his father deliberately thus ensured that he would learn what "real" people outside the bubble were like.

 

John was always interested in writing and in sports—particularly American football and baseball. He dreamed of becoming a sportswriter and enrolled at the University of Michigan in the English department. As he described it to me, he soon could no longer come to grips with the fact that everything there was based on subjective opinion rather than objective fact, which led him to turn to the physical sciences.

 

He began a PhD at Harvard with William E. Lipscomb, who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry some years earlier for his work on boranes. “Bill” was looking to diversify in other areas of chemistry—one of them being biochemistry, another theoretical chemistry.

 

As John told it to me, the biochemistry part of John’s career ended when he had to extract a particular protein from a huge pile of bovine eyes, and he decided this was not for him. Theoretical chemistry, however—given his very high aptitude for mathematics—turned out to be his true calling. After his doctorate, he spent a long stint at the University of Florida’s Quantum Theory Project with Rodney J. Bartlett, as an increasingly more independent postdoc.

 

It was during this period that John and his fellow postdoc Jürgen Gauss—now a full professor at the University of Mainz—programmed large parts of the ACES II program suite, which they eventually forked off as CFOUR.

 

After receiving offers from several first-tier universities, including UC Berkeley, John ultimately chose the University of Texas at Austin, where his tenure was highly productive from a scientific point of view. One of his close friends there was James E. Boggs, of blessed memory (1921-2013), originally a spectroscopist who had moved into theoretical chemistry. I first met John in person at one of the Austin Symposia on Molecular Structure that Jim Boggs organized. We then collaborated in a IUPAC task group on radical thermochemistry — which morphed into the ATcT (active thermochemical tables) initiative that continues to this day, led by Branko Ruscic at Argonne National Laboratory.

 

Ultimately, he returned to the University of Florida to take up the William R. Kenan Professorship and ultimately became the head of the venerable Quantum Theory Project itself.

 

A full summary of John's scientific achievements would require a separate article. Two themes were central, however: coupled cluster (CC) theory, and John’s commitment to validating theory through experiment—especially spectroscopy—and conversely, elucidating spectroscopy through theory. This extended to developing CC methods for electronic excited states (enabling their application to UV-Vis spectroscopy), for anharmonic force fields (and hence computational rotation-vibration spectroscopy), for vibronic coupling, semiclassical transition state theory, and more.

 

And now, a few words about John as a person. He eschewed the trappings of fame and status in his field, and was primarily driven by the pleasure of discovery. It’s no accident that one of John’s favorite song lyrics was “Limelight” by Rush, where Neil Peart (RIP) eloquently expressed his ambivalence about fame and fan adulation, and how they only matter to people who want to be seen at their craft, rather than practicing and perfecting it.

 

John and I had been friends for over two decades and grew especially close in the last two years, when we spent extended periods of time together. Through many deep conversations, I got to know John as an uncommonly warm and generous human being who at the same time was very disdainful of any form of hypocrisy or intellectual dishonesty. He enjoyed many of life’s pleasures outside of science—including sports, the outdoors, reading, cinema — he'd often pull up movie clips and quotes while chatting — and music. He was particularly fond of the classic rock bands The Who and Led Zeppelin — and of a later vintage, of the entire ’80s era of rock and pop music. He would often wistfully refer to this  period in his life by the Shakespearian phrase, “my salad days”, and tell highly entertaining, if at times risqué, tales of his exploits in those years.

 

John is survived by two adult daughters — Juliet, a linguistics professor currently in charge of data operations at a language AI startup, and Audrey, a graphic artist — and by his scientific offspring, which includes many tenured and tenure-track professors by now.

 

His scientific legacy lives on. May his memory be for a blessing.

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Gershom (Jan) Martin

March 22, 2025

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ADDENDUM: the family has set up a memorial page at https://www.forevermissed.com/johnstanton