Hi All >I though this discussion would divide the community but from Armel’s pole (good idea) it hasn’t.
Yes Alan (C. not H. ;-), thanks ! Rietveld poll provisory result after 2 weeks : Yet only 54 Rietveld mailing list subscribers feeling concerned by a possible change of the name of their favourite method suggested by the recent vL&S paper. The current result is : Changing for "Loopstra method" : 2 votes for "Profile method" : 3 votes for "Loopstra, van Laar & Rietveld method" : 1 vote no change (Rietveld method) : 48 votes no opinion ~1500 (!) Voting is not too late for those coming back to work in September after a long August month of conferences. Web link : https://doodle.com/poll/gh3v3nfhue599w23 Best Armel PS - After the Rietveld crucifixion - some arguments for a resurrection Changing the "Rietveld method" name would give reason to the vL&S paper, i.e. admitting that H.M. Rietveld had stolen Loopstra idea and van Laar Mathematics. Voting people in this Rietveld mailing list are obviously not convinced by the main argument of the vL&S paper (grossly that any job made by a post-doc has to be co-signed by his boss, otherwise this is robbing because acknowledgements are not enough - a quite simplistic and brutal view). Deontology of research in public laboratories is well documented but not always respected. In July 1992, the CNRS explained by a letter to his labs that "it is useless that the laboratory director name appears on all the publications." So, imagine how were things by the end of the sixties. In the editorial of Head & Neck 11 (1989) 293, entitled "Responsible Autorship", H. Goepfert stated "...The number of authors should be limited to those who truly contributed to the study - substantially and creatively - in originating the concept, designating a protocol, and supplying the scolastic fuel, academic environment, and expert technical supervision for the study. Routine performance or technical tasks or simple management responsibilities does not merit authorship but does merit acknowledgement. In simple terms, authors must have genuine hands-on involvments." It looks in this affair that Hugo Rietveld having obtained his PhD under the supervision of Ted Maslen (who had come from Oxford where he studied under Dorothy Hodgkin) and having already a paper (among others) published in Nature before coming to Petten - so he was no less than a well confirmed crystallographer with computer skills - has decided to acknowledge Loopstra and van Laar in his main 1969 paper instead of listing them as co-authors. Half a century later, this is contested by the only survivor (van Laar) not claiming in 2018 that H. Schenk was wrong in writing in 2001 "Loopstra had the idea that it should be better to use the whole powder profile rather than estimated intensities to solve structures, van Laar worked it out mathematically and Rietveld programmed it." But does this affirmation can resist to some deepest analysis when Hugo Rietveld tells another story : "With my experience of using computers for single crystal structure refinements and having seen their enormous capacity for handling large amounts of data, I saw the spectre of increasing the number of data by a factor of ten by using the individual intensities y(i), instead of the integrated intensities, constituted no real barrier" ? Schenk accuses Rietveld to have modified one of his original text in his absence, replacing "Loopstra had the idea" by "Rietveld had the idea". And this fact is presented as a proof of Rietveld dishonesty. But had Rietveld any other choice than to correct the error in Schenk absence since he really had the idea and performed the mathematics ? From where Schenk (IUCr president at that time) had taken this incredible affirmation which he let under Hugo's eyes and then go away apparently without even discussing it ? Apparently that Schenk view was from a book by C. D. Andriesse (2000) "...because he published alone in 1969 it came to be known as the Rietveld method and the contribution of his counsellors was consigned to the dustbin of history." At least this story is more than strange and it is presented at the end of the vL&S paper as the decisive blow. Well, is this whole stuff a kind of revenge of Schenk over Rietveld because the latter contested his views about the origin of the Rietveld method - that Rietveld was no more than a programmer executing a command ? It is clear that if Rietveld had not corrected the Schenk sentence attributing the idea to Loopstra, and the mathematics to van Laar, then Schenk could have concluded, well, you see, he has agreed... The fact is that Rietveld signed alone both of his seminal 1967 and 1969 papers. And what happened just after that ? There are not a lot of papers citing Rietveld (1967) as soon as 1968 or 1969, before his more detailed 1969 paper. There is one with Loopstra & van laar in 1968 using and citing the profile refinement method (Rietveld, 1967) and not co-signed by Rietveld - strange enough. If really there was a conflict between them three, this may mean that "OK, we are not on your 1967 method paper, but we can use it without you, thanks dude," or this may mean "you haven't listed us as co-authors, OK, we use your software without listing you" - but there are two Loopstra & Rietveld 1969 papers which contradict this second hypothesis. Anyway, I consider these 3 papers as serious proofs that Loopstra and van Laar were not willing so much to be recognized as co-authors of the profile refinement method during those early times. We can imagine several reasons. For instance a possibility could be that they did not wanted to be on the Rietveld 1967 paper because they could consider that the 1966 software was not yet enough convincing (if yes, they were wrong) - and then Rietveld may have decided to defend his work alone, first at the IUCr 1966 congress - we will never know. Such a situation is frequent, a post-doc needs to publish, and if the boss says to wait, this may become a problem. Another possibility is that there could have been a disagreement about sharing or not the computer program with the whole world, Hugo wanting clearly to do so. If you share then you loose the control and possible collaborations... His true friends (Terry Sabine and Ray Young, at the origin of the "Rietveld method" naming - and so completely convinced that H.M. Rietveld deserved it - up to editing the book "The Rietveld Method" for Ray Young) died too, and cannot provide more light. They may have exchanged more emails with Hugo than me. During the main correspondence we had, in 1998, he explained me why I received a letter from a member of his family in Australia who expected to know more about a famous relative who participated to car racing at Le Mans during years 1920. But I could not find any information in the local archive. Hugo suggested we could meet in person probably at the next IUCr conference in Scotland. I have kept preciously this letter. Indeed, I presented a conference entitled 'The Practice of "|Fobs|" Extraction from Powder Diffraction Data' at IUCr XVIII, Glasgow, 1999 http://www.cristal.org/glasgow/index.html Hugo was there, honoured for the 30th anniversary of his method and having continuously a big cloud of admirative people around him : http://ww1.iucr.org/cong/18/reports/IUCr-99/Reports-pdf/M05.0D.pdf I suppose vL was queuing outside the lecture theatre, unable to get in and to provide some contradiction ? Also Schenk did not claimed for robbery during the conferences. Too bad ! Hugo was still alive. It is interesting to recall what Ray Young wrote in his Introduction to the Rietveld method book he edited : "It was Rietveld (i) who first worked out computer-based analytical procedures (quite sophisticated ones for the time, as it turned out) to make use of the full information content of the powder pattern, (ii) who put them in the public domain by publication of two seminal papers (1967, 1969), and (iii) who, very importantly, freely and widely shared his computer program. It is for these reasons that the method is appropriately referred to now as 'the Rietveld method', or 'Rietveld refinement', or 'Rietveld analysis'." I can add that I personnally stand on his shoulders by using his "Rietveld decomposition formula" for my own way to extract intensities from a powder pattern. Thanks a lot to him for that formula allowing to complete a partial crystal structure by explicit Fourier difference synthesis and even, when iterated, to solve ab initio a completely unknown one ! Filiation is of tremendous importance as you know. The fact that van Laar co-signs a paper with Schenk in which one can find that Schenk says that van Laar does the Mathematics means that van Laar agrees with that sentence. Then, I want to know, is that equation 7 in the Rietveld 1969 paper from van Laar or from Rietveld ? This is important to me... So I ask vL here for a confirmation. Have you really written this decomposition formula ? Do you confirm that Hugo Rietveld has only programmed it in Algol and then in Fortran ? Why having awaited 50 years for that revelation ? One should not play with such things. I had myself to struggle a lot in order to prove that I was the guy who first had this small idea to iterate the Rietveld decomposition formula for intensity extraction from powder data, I exchanged so many letters with developers wanting to implement my method in their own Rietveld software, so I cannot understand that, given what is claimed now in your vL&S paper, you did not struggle as well (with Loopstra, being two against Rietveld) for being recognized in due time, 50 years ago ! This is incredible, and the argument that it did not matter since the paper was not recognized for a while is not relevant. Researchers explode if one do not recognize their contribution, immediately, not 20, 30 or 50 years later. So, I am sorry, but this is too late, and moreover, I simply cannot believe you. Worst, I find this ultimate (as you say, this is the third and last) attack against a dead man contemptible if not ridiculous. Finally, if the vL&S paper was right (not the case I believe), this means that many authorities in the Powder Diffraction field and elsewhere were deceived during years, especially the Committee of the Gregori Aminoff Prize among others having certainly seen the acknowledgements in the 1969 paper and nevertheless having decided that these two guys acknowledged do not deserve more ! Such prizes are not attributed without a serious investigation in order to avoid any contestation. "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." Albert von Szent-Györgyi (Nobel prize-winner in 1937) A citation given by Hugo Rietveld himself at his Website - could be a wink. If we consider Ray Young and the DBW Rietveld software, we have a different story which may be compared though. The DBW software is named after D.B. Wiles who was the programmer. The main papers are co-authored by Wiles & Young (1981) or Young & Wiles (1982). Ray always said (me) that he had done nothing regarding programming. Then I can imagine him asking Hugo about the fact that Loopstra and van Laar were not listed as co-authors but only acknowledged in the 1969 paper. I don't know Hugo's reply to that hypothetical question but Ray is one of the two guys having suggested the "Rietveld method" name (1978), so you can conclude that he was convinced that the Loopstra & van Laar contributions were really limited to suggestions and helpful criticism and were not at all genuine hands-on involvments. For unsubscribing see below :
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