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Knowing the Pioneers
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Schrodinger was born on August 12, 1887, in Vienna, the only child of Rudolf Schrödinger, who was married to the daughter of Alexander Bauer, his Professor of Chemistry at the Technical College of Vienna. He was a prodigy with a broad education. After having finished his chemistry studies, he devoted himself for years to Italian painting. After this he took up botany, which resulted in a series of papers on plant phylogeny. From 1906 to 1910 he was a student at the University of Vienna, during which time he came under the strong influence of Fritz Hasenöhrl, who was Boltzmann ' s successor. It was in these years that Schrödinger acquired a mastery of eigenvalue problems in the physics of continuous media, thus laying the foundation for his future great work. It came as a result of his dissatisfaction with the quantum condition in Bohr ' s orbit theory and his belief that atomic spectra should really be determined by some kind of eigenvalue problem. For this work he shared with Dirac the Nobel Prize for 1933. Schrödinger continued his research and published many papers on a variety of topics, including the problem of unifying gravitation and electromagnetism, which also absorbed Einsteinand which is still unsolved.