A. David Buckingham
A. David Buckingham CBE FRS (28 January 1930 – 4 February 2021) was an Australian chemist known for his work in theoretical chemistry and chemical physics. He studied at the University of Sydney, earning a BSc and MSc, and then earned a PhD at the University of Cambridge under John Pople.
Buckingham spent time at Oxford, Bristol, and Cambridge during his career. He was an 1851 Exhibition Senior Student at Oxford from 1955 to 1957, a fellow at Christ Church, Oxford from 1955 to 1965, and a University Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry from 1958 to 1965. He became Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Bristol (1965–1969) and then Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge beginning in 1969. He was later an Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975 and received several other honors, including the Ahmed Zewail Prize in Molecular Sciences in 2006 and the Harrie Massey Medal and Prize in 1995.
Buckingham’s research focused on how molecules respond to electric, magnetic, and optical fields, and on how molecules interact with each other. He helped develop methods to measure molecular quadrupole moments and studied the dielectric properties of liquids and how solvents affect NMR and vibrational spectra. He showed how strong electric fields can influence NMR spectra and molecular orientation, and in 1968 he determined accurate values for hyperpolarizability using the Kerr effect. In 1971, he and Laurence Barron started the study of Raman optical activity, which looks at how chiral (handed) molecules scatter light differently. In the 1980s, he highlighted the importance of long-range intermolecular forces in small molecule clusters, with applications to biological macromolecules. He also predicted that an electric field can linearly affect how light reflects at interfaces, and in 1995 he showed that the total rotational strength of all vibrational transitions in a chiral molecule sums to zero.
On the personal side, Buckingham married Jillian Bowles in 1965, and they had three children—Lucy, Mark, and Alice—and eight grandchildren. He played first-class cricket for Cambridge University and Free Foresters between 1955 and 1960, later serving as President of the Cambridge University Cricket Club from 1990 to 2009.
David Buckingham died in Cambridge on 4 February 2021, at the age of 91.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 23:09 (CET).