COLLABORATION IN BASIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (COBASE)

Petr Zuman hosted Jiri Ludvik of the Czech Republic in spring 1999. The visit by Ludvik enabled the preparation of proposals, one of which was submitted by Ludvik to the Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic on May 10, 1999. A more extensive proposal to NSF is in preparation. The preliminary results of their research indicated that in systems with C=N-N=C, the bond between N-N is practically a single bond. There are some indications in the data in literature that this might be so, but it has not been shown that this is generally valid. This group hopes to prove that this is a general property of such a system. Zuman and Ludvik have prepared final drafts of three manuscripts, which all have been submitted to scientific journals. During Ludvik’s visit, Zuman and he attended a meeting of the Northern New York Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS), which featured an address by the ACS national president. Ludvik has already been in contact with the president and has received materials from him to be used by the Czech Chemical Society. In May 1999, Zuman took a privately funded trip to Prague and spent three days with Ludvik at the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Science, where they worked on the first draft of a manuscript entitled "Substituent Effects on Reduction of Metamitron." Their personal contact continued in September in Sec, a small town in the Czech Republic, where Zuman delivered the introductory plenary lecture at a meeting commemorating the 40th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to his esteemed teacher, J. Heyrovsky.