Erwin Schrödinger

Erwin Schrödinger (1934)

Erwin Schrödinger (Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, 12 August 1887, Vienna-Erdberg – 4 January 1961, Vienna) was an Austrian physicist and theoretical biologist. He was one of the founding fathers of quantum theory and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.

Life

Schrödinger went to the Academic Gymnasium from 1898 to 1906. Afterwards he studied mathematics and physics in Vienna and wrote his habilitation up from 1910.

He was a soldier in World War I. Afterwards he got professorships in Zürich, Jena, Breslau and Stuttgart. In 1920 he married. In 1927 he went to Berlin to fellow Max Planck.

After the take-over of power by the Nazis, Schrödinger left Germany and got a new professorship in Oxford. In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Three years later he returned to Austria and became professor in Graz. In 1938 he had to leave Austria, because the Nazis had taken over government. He went to Dublin and became director of the School for Theoretical Physics.

In 1956 he returned to Vienna and got a professorship for Theoretical Physics. He died of tuberculosis in 1961.

Important work

Schrödinger's most important work is the wave mechanics – a formulation of quantum mechanics, and especially the Schrödinger equation. He also worked on the field of biophysics. He invented the concept of negentropy and helped to develop molecular biology.