Erwin Schrödinger

Born: 12 Aug 1887 in Vienna, Austria
Died: 4 Jan 1961 in Alpbach, Austria

Schrödinger was a student at Vienna from 1906 and taught there for ten years from 1910 to 1920 with a break for military service in World War I. He went to Zurich in 1921 where he made very important contributions to wave mechanics and the general theory of relativity in a series of papers in 1926. Wave mechanics, proposed by Schrödinger in these papers, was the second formulation of quantum theory, the first being matrix mechanics due to Heisenberg. Schrödinger was awarded the Nobel prize for this work in 1933.

Schrödinger went to Berlin in 1927 where he succeeded Planck and became a colleague of Einstein's.

Although he was a Catholic Schrödinger decided in 1933 that he couldn't live in a country in which persecution of Jews had become a national policy. He left, spending time in Austria, Britain and Italy before settling in Dublin, Ireland in 1940.

His study of Greek science and philosophy is summarized in Nature and the Greeks (1954). He remained in Dublin until he retired in 1956 when he returned to Vienna and wrote his last book Meine Weltansicht (1961) expressing his own metaphysical outlook.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. A Hermann, Erwin Schrödinger - eine Biographie, Die Wellenmechanik (Stuttgart, 1963), 173-192.
  4. W T Scott, Erwin Schrödinger: An Introduction to His Writings (1967).
  5. P A Hanle, The Coming of Age of Erwin Schrödinger : His Quantum Statistics of Ideal Gases, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 17 (1977), 165- .
  6. W J Moore, Schrödinger : Life and Thought (New York, 1989).
  7. M Bitbol, Erwin Schrödinger : un philosophe chez les physiciens, La Recherche 21 (1990), 1392-1399.
  8. D Hoffmann, Erwin Schrödinger (Leipzig, 1984).
  9. W T Scott, Erwin Schrödinger : an introduction to his writings (Amherst, 1967).
  10. J Gotschl (ed.), Erwin Schrödinger's world view : the dynamics of knowledge and reality (Dordrecht, 1992).
  11. J Mehra and H Rechenberg, The historical development of quantum theory Vol.5: Erwin Schrödinger and the rise of wave mechanics (New York, 1987).
  12. W J Moore, A life of Erwin Schrödinger (Cambridge, 1994).
  13. N Symonds, What is life? : Schrodinger's influence on biology, The Quarterly review of biology 61 (1986), 221-226.