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Not much is known about the personal life of Donald McQuarrie. He and his wife, Carole, were married for 50 years. While he was a professor at Indiana University, Carole completed her PhD in Biochemistry. She is listed as a coauthor to the Solutions Manual to Donald’s General Chemistry. They enjoyed spending time together attending IU Alumni events, such as the 1979 American Chemistry Society Meeting. They have two children together, Allan McQuarrie and Dawn Leslie McQuarrie. After Donald’s time at University of California, Davis☃☃, they retired together in Sea Ranch, California☃☃ where they enjoyed playing bridge, participating in the Lions Clubs and Art Society, and taking their dogs for long walks. Carole still lives in Gualala, California, following her husband’s passing in 2009.

Out of McQuarrie’s many published works, one of his most notable papers is entitled “Study of the Chaotic Behavior of a Damped and Driven Oscillator in an Asymmetric Double-well potential.” He published this during his time at UC Davis and extensively tried to relate the findings of this paper to the undergraduate population. Before going into the technicalities of his research, McQuarrie explains that few real systems are described by the predictable behavior found by analytical solutions. This practice of oversimplifying systems, while a good start to understanding scenarios, is just that – an oversimplification. McQuarrie explains that the concept chaotic behavior “results when inaccuracies of uncertainties in the starting conditions grow exponentially, as opposed to linearly, with time; consequently, the system’s state shortly becomes totally unpredictable.” In his paper, McQuarrie discusses the numerical methods needed to mathematically model the scenario of an asymmetrical double-well potential. Although the findings of this paper modeled a somewhat specific scenario, he emphasized that “it is no longer necessary for students to confine their studies to systems having only analytical solutions,” again showing his commitment to bettering academia.