William Wiswesser

William Joseph (Bill) Wiswesser (December 3, 1914 – December 17, 1989) was an American chemist best known as the creator of the Wiswesser line notation (WLN), an innovative way to represent chemical structures in a linear string of characters suitable for computer manipulation.

He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania to Louis and Hattie (Flatt) Wiswesser in 1914.

He graduated from Lehigh University in 1936, and his papers were deposited there after his death. He was awarded a doctorate there in 1970.

In 1970 he was awarded the Department of the Army Award of Merit, the highest honour which can be given by the United States Army to a civilian, in recognition of his "Chemical Line-Formula Notation", the WLN.

In 1975 he was awarded the Austin M. Patterson Award for chemical information science.

Wiswesser received the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Information's Herman Skolnik Award in 1980, with a citation "For pioneering mathematical, physical, and chemical methods of punched-card and computer-stored representation of molecular structures, leading to the creation of the Wiswesser Line Notation (WLN) for concise storage and retrieval of chemical structures ...".

At the end of his life he was working for the United States Department of Agriculture on weed science until his final illness, and he died on 17 December 1989, aged 75, in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, leaving a widow, Katherine, and a son, daughter and four grandchildren.

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