Perspective on “A molecular orbital theory of reactivity in aromatic hydrocarbons”

Abstract.

The development of theories for interpreting the course of chemical reactions is one of the most important achievements of theoretical chemistry in the twentieth century. I selected the paper by Fukui et al. from 1952, proposing the frontier electron density as the reactivity index for the orientation of electrophilic substitution reactions. This paper may be regarded as a bridge between an older reactivity theory, the electronic theory of organic chemistry, and new ones predicting the stereochemical courses of reactions such as frontier orbital theory and the Woodward–Hoffmann rule.