Martin Karplus

Martin Karplus (March 15, 1930 – December 28, 2024) was an Austrian-born American theoretical and computational chemist renowned for pioneering molecular dynamics simulations and multiscale modeling of complex chemical systems, work for which he shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel.

Born in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family of intellectuals, Karplus fled with his family to the United States in 1938 ahead of the Nazi annexation, settling in the Boston area where his father took a position at Harvard Medical School as a research chemist. He earned a B.A. from Harvard College in 1950 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1953 under the supervision of Linus Pauling, focusing on quantum mechanical calculations of molecular structures.

Martin Karplus was born on March 15, 1930, in Vienna, Austria, into a secular Jewish family. His father, Hans Karplus, was a businessman in banking who managed family interests in a health clinic, while his mother, Isabella (née Goldstern), worked as a dietician at the same clinic. He had an older brother, Robert, and enjoyed a privileged early childhood surrounded by an extended family of intellectuals, including a paternal grandfather who was a neurologist and a great-aunt who was an archeologist. Family discussions often touched on scientific topics, reflecting the intellectual environment of their extended family and fostering young Karplus's curiosity about the natural world.

The rise of antisemitism in 1930s Austria profoundly disrupted this idyllic period. By 1937, even childhood friends in Vienna had turned hostile, taunting Karplus and his brother with slurs like "dirty Jew boys," signaling the growing peril for Jewish families. The Nazi Anschluss on March 12, 1938—just days before Karplus's eighth birthday—intensified the threat, leading to his father's immediate arrest by Nazi authorities. Fearing for their safety, Karplus's mother arranged for him and his brother to flee with her by train to Switzerland on March 13, 1938, disguising the trip as a "ski vacation." His father was released after approximately six months, having been forced to surrender family possessions and pay an exit tax, and rejoined them in France later that year; the family then sailed from Le Havre to New York Harbor on October 8, 1938, aided by visas secured through an uncle in the United States.