Dr. George W. Wheland

Dyson Perrins Laboratory

Oxford

England

Dear George:

I am glad to see your chapter on further approximate methods. I have mislaid the list of chapter and section topics which we formulated. If you have a copy I wish you would send me a copy of it; if not, I wish you would send me the list as you remember it. Jack has sent the manuscript of his appendix on numerical methods. As soon as I have gone over it and had it typed I shall send a copy to you for criticism.

I am interested to learn that you are going to Chicago, and I hope that you find it satisfactory from every point of view. Your position here has been held open, without any inconvenience to us, although we might have been put to some trouble if Brockway had not received his Guggenheim Fellowship. He is excited about that now and is working hard to get his results prepared for publication before August.

Penney’s treatment seems to me too to be a good one, and Brockway and I are planning to discuss it in our long paper on inter-atomic distances in hydrocarbons. I think it might be wise to retain our curve corrected for the new double bond value, in discussing double bond character, and to use Penney’s curve in connection with a quantity called the order of the bond, the double bond character being of more chemical significance and the order of the bond of more quantum mechanical significance. I haven’t yet seen Lennard-Jones’ paper nor Hückel’s brainstorm.

The contract was lot a few days ago for the construction of four new buildings, the new chemistry building, second biology building, and two geology buildings, and excavation for the chemistry building is supposed to start this week. We are all looking forward to moving into the new building a year from now, and I especially am anxious to have a chemical laboratory of my own, so that I won’t have to work in the little chemical room in Astrophysics.

With best regards to Mrs. Wheland, I am

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling