Advances In Dynamic Stereochemistry

A comprehensive overview of fundamental concepts of asymmetric synthesis along with in-depth discussion. Recent developments that address important synthetic challenges are presented and highlighted with hundreds of examples.

Stereochemistry is an important facet of chemistry. The study of stereochemical problems spans the entire range of organic, inorganic, biological, physical and supramolecular chemistries.Stereochemistry includes methods for determining and describing these relationships; the effect on the physical or biological properties these relationships impart upon the molecules in question, and the manner in which these relationships influence the reactivity of the molecules in question (dynamic stereochemistry). This book provides new research from around the globe on this field.

This series presents review articles pertaining to molecular systems which are of interest due primarily to the presence of structural features or characteristics about which prior predictions can be based on present knowledge of chemical theory.

The progress in computer technology during the last 10-15 years has enabled the performance of ever more precise quantum mechanical calculations related to structure and interactions of chemical compounds. However, the qualitative models relating electronic structure to molecular geometry have not progressed at the same pace. There is a continuing need in chemistry for simple concepts and qualitatively clear pictures that are also quantitatively comparable to ab initio quantum chemical calculations. Topological methods and, more specifically, graph theory as a fixed-point topology, provide in principle a chance to fill this gap. With its more than 100 years of applications to chemistry, graph theory has proven to be of vital importance as the most natural language of chemistry. The explosive development of chemical graph theory during the last 20 years has increasingly overlapped with quantum chemistry. Besides contributing to the solution of various problems in theoretical chemistry, this development indicates that topology is an underlying principle that explains the success of quantum mechanics and goes beyond it, thus promising to bear more fruit in the future.