Fifty Years of a Dispute. A Triptych: Why Woodward?

This publication discusses R. B. Woodward's motivations, personality qualities, and chemical experiences that placed him in a perfect position to discover, along with Roald Hoffmann, the solution to the pericyclic no-mechanism problem, that is, to discover the Woodward-Hoffmann rules or, as Woodward preferred, the Principle of Conservation of Orbital Symmetry.