S. Francis Boys


Francis Boys was a British theoretical chemist.

Education

Boys was born in Pudsey, Yorkshire, England. He was educated at the Grammar School in Pudsey and then at Imperial College London. He graduated in Chemistry in 1932. He did his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, supervised first by Professor Martin Lowry, and then, after Lowry's death in 1936, by Sir John Lennard-Jones.

Career

In 1938, Boys was appointed an Assistant Lecturer in Mathematical Physics at Queen's University Belfast. He spent the whole of the Second World War working on explosives research with the Ministry of Supply at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, with Lennard-Jones as his supervisor. After the war, Boys accepted an ICI Fellowship at Imperial College, London. In 1949, he was appointed to a Lectureship in theoretical chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He remained at Cambridge until his death. He was only elected to a Cambridge College Fellowship at University College, now Wolfson College, Cambridge, shortly before his death.
Boys is best known for the introduction of Gaussian orbitals into ab initio quantum chemistry. Almost all basis sets used in computational chemistry now employ these orbitals. Frank Boys was also one of the first scientists to use digital computers for calculations on polyatomic molecules.
An International Conference, entitled "Molecular Quantum Mechanics: Methods and Applications" was held in memory of S. Francis Boys and in honour of Isaiah Shavitt in September 1995 at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

Awards and honours

Boys was a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972, not long before his death.