Professor Emeritus, Chemistry; PhD, California Institute of Technology
AB Harvard 1960; PhD Caltech 1964; Postdoc Yale 1964; Hopkins 1965-2018; Professor Emeritus 2018-present.
Professor Silverstone most recently invented the “educated match” method, which generalizes the Borel-Padé (and Padé approximant) method, to sum divergent (and convergent) power series, which occur in quantum chemistry and physics; an appropriate approximate function is constructed whose own series matches the first 2n terms.
His earlier work treated the electric-field tunneling-ionization of the hydrogen atom, perturbation of hydrogen, general perturbation theory, the “JWKB” connection formula, convergence of the “configuration interaction” expansion, the long-distance behavior of “Hartree-Fock” orbitals, how electrons avoid each other in molecules, and quantum chemical calculations via Fourier transforms.
Current Interests: Summation of divergent power series, Molecular electronic structure, Baking breads, Scholarly lectures and discussions, Meetings of the Hopkins Academy