Computers have been applied to problems in chemistry and the chemical
sciences since the dawn of the computer age; however, it is only in the
past ten or fifteen years that we have seen the emergence of
computational chemistry as a field of research in its own right. Its
practitioners, computational chemists, are neither chemists who dabble
in computing nor programmers who have an interest in chemistry, but
computa- tional scientists whose aim is to solve a wide range of
chemical problems using modern computing machines. This book gives a
broad overview of the methods and techniques employed by the
computational chemist and of the wide range of problems to which he is
applying them. It is divided into three parts. The first part records
the basics of chemistry and of computational science that are essential
to an understanding of the methods of computational chemistry. These
methods are described in the second part of the book. In the third part,
a survey is given of some areas in which the techniques of computational
chemistry are being applied. As a result of the limited space available
in a single volume, the areas covered are necessarily selective.
Nevertheless, a sufficiently wide range of applications are described to
provide the reader with a balanced overview of the many problems being
attacked by computational studies in chemistry.