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.

Over the last decade, increased attention to reaction dynamics, combined with the intensive application of computers in chemical studies, mathematical modeling of chemical processes, and mechanistic studies has brought graph theory to the forefront of research. It offers an advanced and powerful formalism for the description of chemical reactions and their intrinsic reaction mechanisms. Chemical Reaction Networks: A Graph-Theoretical Approach elegantly reviews and expands upon graph theory as applied to mechanistic theory, chemical kinetics, and catalysis. The authors explore various graph-theoretical approaches to canonical representation, numbering, and coding of elementary steps and chemical reaction mechanisms, the analysis of their topological structure, the complexity estimation, and classification of reaction mechanisms. They discuss topologically distinctive features of multiroute catalytic and noncatalytic and chain reactions involving metal complexes. With it's careful balance of clear language and mathematical rigor, the presentation of the authors' significant original work, and emphasis on practical applications and examples, Chemical Reaction Networks: A Graph Theoretical Approach is both an outstanding reference and valuable tool for chemical research.

Building on the background of graph theory provided in the first volume of the series, presents a detailed examination of the role of graph theory in the study of chemical kinetics, reaction mechanisms, and quantitative structure-activity relations, in a manner useful to theoretical chemists. Among the topics are heterogeneous catalytic reactions, the classification and coding of chemical reaction mechanisms, the mechanist's description of chemical processes as it relates to aromaticity, and using operator networks to interpret evolutionary interrelations between chemical entities. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This volume presents the fundamentals of graph theory and then goes on to discuss specific chemical applications. Chapter 1 provides a historical setting for the current upsurge of interest in chemical graph theory. Chapter 2 gives a full background of the basic ideas and mathematical formalism of graph theory and includes such chemically relevant notions as connectedness, graph matrix representations, metric properties, symmetry and operations on graphs. This is followed by a discussion on chemical nomenclature and the trends in its rationalization by using graph theory, which has important implications for the storage and retrieval of chemical information. This volume also contains a detailed discussion of the relevance of graph-theoretical polynomials; it describes methodologies for the enumeration of isomers, incorporating the classical Polya method, as well as more recent approaches.

The electron density of a non-degenerate ground state system determines essentially all physical properties of the system. This statement of the Hohenberg–Kohn theorem of Density Functional Theory plays an exceptionally important role among all the fundamental relations of Molecular Physics. In particular, the electron density distribution and the dynamic properties of this density determine both the local and global reactivities of molecules. High resolution experimental electron densities are increasingly becoming available for more and more molecules, including macromolecules such as proteins. Furthermore, many of the early difficulties with the determination of electron densities in the vicinity of light nuclei have been overcome. These electron densities provide detailed information that gives important insight into the fundamentals of molecular structure and a better understanding of chemical reactions. The results of electron density analysis are used in a variety of applied fields, such as pharmaceutical drug discovery and biotechnology. If the functional form of a molecular electron density is known, then various molecular properties affecting reactivity can be determined by quantum chemical computational techniques or alternative approximate methods.

This book presents an up-to-date view of theories, practical methods and applications of solvent effects and chemical reactivity in condensed phases. Subjects treated include continuum solvation models, the theoretical basis for the treatment of solvent effects in density functional theory, Monte Carlo simulations of chemical reactions in solution, DFT molecular dynamics simulations, crossing the transition state in solution, valence bond multi-state approach to chemical reactions in solution, quantum theory of solvent effects and chemical reactions. The approaches taken as well as the resulting findings are discussed in detail, thus covering a large part of the methodology currently used in this field. Audience: This volume will be useful to graduate students in chemistry, physical chemistry and biochemistry, to research workers with a background in quantum chemistry and quantum mechanics, to pure and applied quantum chemists, and to industrial molecular modellers.

Topology is becoming increasingly important in chemistry because of its rapidly growing number of applications. Here, its many uses are reviewed and the authors anticipate what future developments might bring. This work shows how significant new insights can be gained by representing molecular species as topological structures known as topographs. The text explores carbon structures, establishing how the stability of fullerene species can be accounted for and also predicting which fullerenes will be most stable. It is pointed out that molecular topology, rather than molecular geometry, characterizes molecular shape and various tools for shape characterization are described. Several of the fascinating ideas that arise from regarding topology as a unifying principle in chemical bonding theory are discussed, and in particular, the novel concept of the molecular topoid is shown to have numerous uses. The topological description of polymers is examined and the reader is gently guided through the realms of branched and tangled polymers. Overall, this work outlines the fact that topology is not only a theoretical discipline but also one that has practical applications and high relevance to the whole domain of chemistry.