Abstract
ERWIN SCHRÖDINGEB, born at Vienna in 1887, comes from that distinguished Austrian school of physics of Which Stefan, Loschmidt, Mach and Boltzmann of which Stefan, Loschmidt, Mach and Boltzmann were the most notable representatives. He began his academic career in 1914 as Privat-Dozent at the University of Vienna. Since 1920 has ecoupied chairs of theoretical physics in Stuttgart,Bneslau, Zurich and Berlin, where he was the successor of Max Planck. After Hitler's access to power in 1933, he left Germany of his own free will and went to Oxford. After a short interlude' in Graz, which ended with the "Anschluss", he went to Dublin to become a member, and for a time director, of the newly founded Institute for Advanced Studies. Schrod-inger's first publications cover a wide field, for example, vibrations and specific heat of crystals, quantum mechanics of spectra, and so on. Most remarkable are his investigations in the mathematical structure of the physiological colour-space. His international fame, however, is based on his wave mechanics of 1926. The series of papers, in which he developed an ingenious idea of de Broglie's to a complete theory of atomic structures, and demonstrated, moreover, the relation of his wave equation to other forms of quantum mechanics (Heisenberg–Born– Jordan, Dirac), belong to the classics of theoretical physics by virtue of their depth, wealth, completeness and brilliant style. In recent years, Schrödinger has made great efforts to unify the different field theories of physics into a coherent system. He has further published several little books, one of which was a condensed presentation of statistical thermodynamics ; another, with the daring title "What is Life ?", being an expansion of the modern theory of heredity from the point of view of the physicist. Although Schrödinger has never had a school of his own, he has influenced physics immensely. There is scarcely a paper on atomic theory which does not refer to his name in connexion with his wave equation.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Prof. E. Schrödinger. Nature 163, 794 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163794b0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163794b0