Hi Group, This is to remind you that.. Prof. David Avnir from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem will visiting the Aspuru-Guzik group and will give an informal seminar this coming *Monday 28th at 11am in the Division Room.* The topic is: *Symmetry and Chirality (continuous) measures and what can be done with them all across chemistry. * Abstract: We have been developing the notion that structural chemistry is too rich to be described with the coarse binary language of either being or not being symmetric or chiral. We have proposed that it agrees with chemical, biochemical and physical intuition to ask questions such as: “What is the symmetry content of a molecule (the structure of which cannot be described in exact symmetry terms?)“; or, “given a set of chiral molecules, by how much do they differ from each other in their chirality content?”; and so on. Addressing the need to answer this type of structural questions, which are common to many domains of chemistry, we showed that the problem of how to quantify symmetry and achirality is solvable. Towards this goal we have developed the Continuous Symmetry Measure (CSM), the resulting Continuous Chirality Measure (CCM) and, together with Prof. S. Alvarez and his colleagues from Barcelona, also the Continuous Shape measure. In essence, the measures quantify the distance of a given structure from the desired ideal symmetry, or from achirality, or from a reference shape. Webpage: http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/avnir/topics.html#sym Hope to see you there! Adrian