Walter Kohn · Science & Medicine
Physicist, co-founder of density functional theory; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1998
1923, Vienna, Austria — 2016, Santa Barbara, California, USA
Austria · Canada · United States (UC Santa Barbara)
Walter Kohn is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Physicist, co-founder of density functional theory; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1998
Origins and early life
Walter Kohn was born in Vienna on 9 March 1923 into a Jewish family, and left for England on the Kindertransport immediately after Hitler annexed Austria. His parents, Salomon and Gittel Kohn, were murdered in the Holocaust, along with other relatives and several of his teachers; he wrote that his feelings towards his native country were and would remain very painful, and that he held a strong Jewish identity, which he put to work later in founding a Judaic studies programme at the University of California in San Diego.
As an Austrian national he was shipped to Canada in 1940, at seventeen, across U-boat waters, and interned in camps in Quebec; the camps ran a few classes, he took all of them, and got himself into the University of Toronto, where, being a German national, he was forbidden to enter the chemistry building and so read physics and mathematics instead.
Work and career
He took a doctorate at Harvard in 1948 under Julian Schwinger. The problem he solved is that the quantum equations for a solid involve every electron at once and cannot be written down, let alone solved. With Pierre Hohenberg and Lu Jeu Sham he proved that everything about the ground state is fixed by one much simpler quantity, the electron density, and produced equations for it — density functional theory, which turned an impossible calculation into a routine one and is now the ordinary tool of chemistry and materials science. He shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Pople, and died in Santa Barbara on 19 April 2016.
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Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Chemistry
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Physicist, co-founder of density functional theory; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1998
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Chemistry
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