[3] He pioneered and developed a mathematical method that has changed the whole field of chemistry and opened a new era in research in determination of molecular structures of crystallized materials.

It was the application of this mathematical method to a wide variety of chemical structures that led the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to name Hauptman and Jerome Karle recipients of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

After the war he started a collaboration with Jerome Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and at the same time enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

[5] This combination of mathematics and physical chemistry expertise enabled them to tackle head-on the phase problem of X-ray crystallography.

The Centrosymmetric Crystal", contained the main ideas, the most important of which was the introduction of probabilistic methods through a development of the Sayre equation.