Rodney J. Bartlett

Rodney Joseph Bartlett (born March 31, 1944, in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.) is Graduate Research Professor of Chemistry and Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville, US.

Career

He received his B.Sc. degree from Millsaps College in 1966 and Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1971. Bartlett was an NDEA and IBM predoctoral fellow at the University of Florida under the joint supervision of N. Yngve Öhrn and Per-Olov Löwdin. Bartlett was subsequently an NSF postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark with Jan Linderberg and a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University with Robert G. Parr. Bartlett became a staff scientist at Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and then at Battelle Memorial Institute, Ohio. In 1981, Bartlett returned to Gainesville, as a professor of Chemistry and Physics, and then in 1988 rose to the rank of Graduate Research Professor.

Bartlett has been widely recognized as a pioneer of rigorous many-body methods for electron correlation, in particular, many-body perturbation and coupled cluster methods, which are today's central computational tool for accurate electronic structure predictions. Bartlett and his coworkers were the first to formulate and implement coupled cluster theory with all single and double excitation operators (CCSD) in 1982, followed by triple (CCSDT) in 1987, quadruple (CCSDTQ), and even quintuple (CCSDTQP) excitation operators, and also many-body perturbation methods up to the sixth order. He developed a version of Feynman diagrams that both expedited the derivation of the equations and helped to visualize the physics of electron correlation. He also promoted the concept of size extensivity for many-body theory that scales properly with the number of particles, now viewed as an essential element of sound quantum chemistry approximations.