Jack D. Dunitz (1923–2021): a chemists’ crystallographer

Jack D. Dunitz (1923–2021) was Professor of Chemical Crystallography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. He received his degrees from Glasgow University, was at the ETH Zurich since 1957, and retired in 1990. His research interests included crystal structure analysis as a tool for solving chemical problems, polymorphism, solid state reactions, and a broad area of structural variations during chemical events under the umbrella term of structure correlation.

Mercury 4.0: from visualization to analysis, design and prediction

The program Mercury, developed at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, was originally designed primarily as a crystal structure visualization tool. Over the years the fields and scientific communities of chemical crystallography and crystal engineering have developed to require more advanced structural analysis software. Mercury has evolved alongside these scientific communities and is now a powerful analysis, design and prediction platform which goes a lot further than simple structure visualization.