Erwin Schrödinger

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was born on 12 August 1887 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He studied physics at the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1910. After serving in the First World War, he held positions at several European universities before accepting a professorship at the University of Zurich.

In 1926, working in Zurich, Schrödinger published the equation that now bears his name: a partial differential equation that describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes over time. This was a significant development in the formulation of quantum mechanics, providing a mathematical framework grounded in wave mechanics. In the same year, he demonstrated the mathematical equivalence of his wave mechanics and the matrix mechanics formulation developed by Werner Heisenberg and colleagues.

In 1927, Schrödinger succeeded Max Planck in the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin. After the National Socialist government came to power in Germany in 1933, Schrödinger, who had ethical objections to the new regime, left Germany and eventually settled at the University of Oxford. In the same year, 1933, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Paul Dirac.

In 1940, Schrödinger accepted an invitation to join the newly established Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where he remained until 1956. During this period he delivered a series of lectures that were published in 1944 as the book What Is Life?, in which he applied concepts from physics to the question of how genetic information might be encoded in biological molecules. This work has been cited by several molecular biologists as an influence on their research.

Schrödinger returned to Vienna in 1956 and was appointed to a special professorship at the University of Vienna. He died on 4 January 1961 in Vienna.