Alan Turing and Martin Feinberg were two of the most abstract thinkers in the history of scientific computing. Their theories led to successful and practical applications for chemical reaction systems, thus validating the maxim that there is nothing so practical as a good theory. In this lecture we will take a 90 year journey from the 1930’s to the 2020’s to discover how we arrived at the current state-of-the-art, and how to calculate the ultimate selectivity of a complex reaction system over all conceivable integrated reactor configurations without ever needing to specify exactly what the integrated process actually is. The results of the methodology do not lead directly to a practical embodiment of a chemical process but they often give insights that stimulate the imagination of creative chemical engineers.
