Schrödinger, Erwin#

b. Vienna, Aug. 12, 1887, d. Vienna, Jan. 4, 1961. Physicist, co-founder of wave mechanics, won Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 (with P. Dirac) for developing the application of wave mechanics to atomic structure, presented in his work "Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem" ("Quantisation as an eigenvalue problem") (1926), pupil of F. Hasenoehrl and F. Exner in Vienna, university professor in Stuttgart, Wroclav, from 1921 in Zurich, 1927 successor of M. Planck in Berlin, from 1934 in Oxford, 1936-1938 in Graz; while in exile, at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1955 returned to Vienna, 1950/51 guest lectures in Innsbruck. He developed a second-order differential equation, the wave equation of matter. The now famous S. equation, corrected by him and Dirac (1928) by adaptation to the insights gained from the theory of relativity, describes the discrete energy levels of electrons in atoms as eigenvalues of the differential equation. He thus showed that the dual nature of light (particle and wave) found by A. Einstein applied to all matter. S.´s findings have contributed to a new conception of the world, which revolutionalised physics and created a new basis for understanding nature. Numerous awards. The Austrian Academy of Sciences founded the E. S. Prize in 1956, which is awarded every year for outstanding achievements in the field of natural sciences with special consideration to the subjects physics and chemistry.

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