An interdisciplinary study on monosubstituted benzene involving computation, statistics and chemistry

Abstract

Computation and statistics have given a great contribution to chemical research and education becauseboth sciences make possible to deal with many different types of information about atoms andmolecules. This paper describes the use of computation and statistics to study 20 different groups inmonosubstituted benzene. Firstly, compounds had their geometries optimized and molecular descriptorswere computed. Then, two exploratory methods, principal component analysis and hierarchicalcluster analysis, were employed to classify these groups according to their activating and deactivatingeffects on rate of electrophilic aromatic substitution reactions. The pedagogical objective isto show an interdisciplinary application in organic chemistry and motivate students and teachers toapply this strategy in the classroom.