chemistry

Laurie Butler

Laurie Butler is a chemistry topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Laurie Butler rather than just read about it. In short: Laurie Jeanne Butler (born 1959) is an American physical chemist known for her experimental work testing the Born–Oppenheimer approximation on separability of nuclear and electron motions. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Chicago.

Key takeaways

Laurie Butler belongs to chemistry; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Laurie Butler to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Laurie Butler from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Laurie Jeanne Butler (born 1959) is an American physical chemist known for her experimental work testing the Born–Oppenheimer approximation on separability of nuclear and electron motions. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Chicago.

Education and career Butler's parents were both medical professionals. She is the identical twin sister of Lynne Butler, now a professor of mathematics at Haverford College; they were the youngest of six siblings, and grew up in Garden City, New York. After Butler's father had a stroke, the family moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Butler went to high school. She started her undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University, intending to study molecular biology or neuroscience. After discovering the large number of animal sacrifices needed for experiments in those areas, she shifted her interests to chemistry, and after a year she transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She completed her bachelor's degree at MIT in 1981. She went to the University of California, Berkeley for her doctoral studies, working there with Yuan T. Lee on photodissociation. After completing her Ph.D. in 1985, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1987.

Recognition Butler won a Sloan Research Fellowship in 1992 and she won the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at The University of Chicago in 1993. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002. In 2011 she became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science "for distinguished contributions to the field of physical chemistry, particularly for elegant experimental studies of chemical reaction dynamics of radical and molecular species", and in the same year she also became a Fellow of the American Chemical Society. In 2018 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Personal life Butler's husband Michael Stein is the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor in Statistics at the University of Chicago. They have one daughter.

Textbook Butler is a co-author of the 8th edition of the textbook Principles of Modern Chemistry (Cengage, 2016) with David W. Oxtoby and H. P. Gillis.

References

External links The Butler Group at the University of Chicago

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Laurie Butler

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Laurie Butler claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In chemistry, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Laurie Butler before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Laurie Butler ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Laurie Butler

In research: Laurie Butler appears in chemistry research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Laurie Butler in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Laurie Butler is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1955 births, 21st-century American women, American women academics, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Laurie Butler outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Laurie Butler in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Laurie Butler means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Laurie Butler out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Laurie Butler in simple terms?

Why does Laurie Butler matter?

Because it connects several chemistry ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Laurie Butler?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Laurie Butler.