Maitland Jones Jr. will retire after having taught organic chemistry at Princeton for more than 40 years. Born in New York in  1937, Mait  began his  chemistry career  at the  tender age of 13, working summers as a bottle washer in the laboratory of the man who was to inspire his lifelong passion for physical organic chemistry, Yale professor William von Eggers Doering. Mait went on to study chemistry and play tennis at Yale, completing his undergraduate work and his Ph.D. under the tutelage of Doering. After a postdoctoral year at Yale and a second postdoc at Wisconsin with Jerry Berson, Mait joined the chemistry faculty at Princeton in 1964, rising through the ranks to become the David B. Jones Professor of Chemistry.

For Mait, organic molecules present a fascinating challenge: the relationship between their structure and their reactivity. What happens when a molecule’s reactivity is constrained by its novel geometry? How much distortion through bending, twisting, or crowding will a molecule or a reactive center tolerate before launching into new and unpredictable chemistry? How does the introduction of a heteroatom—or indeed, a framework based on non-carbon atoms—affect the properties of a reactive center? What is the impact of alignment or misalignment of molecular orbitals on these molecules and their reactivity? These seemingly esoteric questions require a creative and elegant approach to test the fundamental principles of organic structure-reactivity relationships. That inventiveness is the hallmark of the research that Mait directed at Princeton as he and his legion of collaborators investigated the reactions and spin states of carbenes, arynes, twisted π systems, and carborane chemistry.

Mait has an impressive research trail, commencing with his naming the then-hypothetical molecule bullvalene (a seemingly trivial C10H10 structure with over 1.2 million possible isomers!) and the discovery of the oxy-Cope rearrangement before he came to Princeton. His research here focused on the synthesis of strained aromatic molecules, singlet and triplet carbene chemistry, explorations of chemistry on synthetic diamond sur- faces, and proposals to use carboranes to deliver cancer drugs. On each of these projects, he worked with an array of colleagues at every level of experience, ranging from pre-college level to distinguished professors. His published oeuvre includes more than 200 papers, monographs and books, most of them with co-authors from among more than 60 undergraduates, 30 graduate students, and 34 postdoctoral and visiting fellows. They included those who were among the fi t Chinese and Russian scientists to be permitted to come to the United States after having been shut out during the Cold War. “Jones Alley,” as the lab was known, was an incubator of scientific and cultural exchange at all levels.