1. 1 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM Quantum chemistry judged not from the ever present possibility of unex- pected developments but on the basis of the achievements in the last fifty years, is predominantly limited to attempts to solve for the energy and expectation values of wave functions representing, in the limit, an exact solution to the Schroedinger equation. Because of well-known dif- ficulties in system with more than about 50 electrons, the adopted ap- proximations are generally rather crude. As examples of quantum chemical approximations we mention the total or partial neglects of...

This volume collects a number of the invited lectures and a few selected contrib utions presented at the International Symposium on Structure and Dynamics of Nucleic Acids, Proteins and Membranes held August 31st through September 5th, 1986, in Riva del Garda, Italy. The title of the conference as well as a number of the topics covered represent a continuation of two previous conferences, the first held in 1982 at the University of California in San Diego, and the second in 1984 in Rome at the Accademia dei Lincei. These two earlier conferences have been documented in Structure and Dynamics:...

Any study on the historical evolution of nations and countries points out the decisive importance of productivity trends. We are all very familiar with the main evolution which started with a hunting society at the dawn of civilization, then moved to an agricultural society, and quickly to craftsmanship and com merce. The beginning of the industrial society dates back to the end of the eighteenth century in England, with the introduction of the assembly line in the textile and smelting industries. However, in the last few decades, we are becoming more and more acutely aware of the paramount...

In a way the MOTECC-89 project started in the early sixties at the IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose, California. The six years of post-doctoral research, first with Giulio Natta on conductive polymers, with Michael Kasha on spin-orbit effects, with Kenneth S. Pitzer on high temperature molecules and thermo dynamics and with R. S. Mulliken in the quantum chemistry of small molecules had demonstrated pragmatically the importance of a broad-based research and also let me taste some of the excitement to be derived from interdisciplinarity. Thus when I started to gather a department in the...