Remembering Professor Arnold Rheingold
We were saddened to learn of the passing of Professor Arnold Rheingold earlier in March. Arnold, known by many in the community as Arnie, was a predominant figure in crystallography and his prolific output of structural data meant he had a huge influence on the contents of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).
I first met Arnie back in 2014 at an ACS meeting in Dallas and I know a few members of the CCDC have had the pleasure to meet him over the years, either at a conference, the CCDC offices in Cambridge or User Group Meetings in the US. He will be sadly missed by all of us that met him and his legacy will live on through his data and scientific articles.
In total Arnie authored 7,665 structures in the CSD. This is nearly 800 more structures than anyone else in the database, which is an outstanding achievement. The structures were added over a 47 year time period and 673 were published over the last 3 years, which is also quite remarkable. Arnie was passionate about sharing as much of his data as he could and he now holds the record for publishing the most CSD Communications too. He was the first author to reach 2,000 CSD Communications and in total he has 2,355.
As well as advocating for crystallographers to share more data, he championed for the crystallographers details to be displayed alongside the datasets in the CSD so scientists would know who is responsible for the correctness of the data and to provide proper acknowledgment in the database for the crystallographer. As a result, crystallographer details are now required during the CCDC deposition process and these details are displayed through Access Structures and WebCSD. This is particularly important in cases where the crystallographer is not a named author on the associated scientific article.
We really do have a lot to thank Arnie for and so we wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate the beauty and diversity of some of his thousands of structures. Arnie published CSD structures with 3,582 scientists worldwide, but his most prolific collaborator was James Golen closely followed by Curtis Moore.
Arnie’s entries range from simple organics to more complex metal-organic structures, and include both single crystal and powder samples from X-ray and Neutron diffraction. They also feature in many of the CSD Subsets including the drugs, MOF, polymorphic and disorder subsets.
Of his recent structures, 94.5% have crystal colour labels and 75.0% have habit labels, with colourless crystals being the far most common crystals he handled. In total his structures also contained a staggering 78 different elements and were determined in 104 unique space-groups.
We and the scientific community have a lot to thank Arnie for and he will be very much missed by us and everyone that met him.