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Walter Kohn
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OverviewAI-generated
Walter Kohn was a physicist, chemist, and university teacher born in Vienna in 1923. He held citizenship in Canada, the United States, and Austria. Kohn was educated at Akademisches Gymnasium, the University of Toronto, and Harvard University, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy. His doctoral advisor was Julian Schwinger. He worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of California, San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Kohn’s field of work was theoretical physics, and he is noted for density functional theory. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal, the Three Physicists Prize, and the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize. He was a member of the Royal Society, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He died of laryngeal cancer in Santa Barbara in 2016.
Synthesized by Vinony from 29 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Nobel Prize
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry1998
“for his development of the density-functional theory”
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Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Walter
- Family name
- Kohn
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- Austria
- Place of birth
- Vienna
- Place of death
- Santa Barbara
- Occupation
- chemist
- Educated at
- Akademisches Gymnasium
- Employer
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Notable work
- density functional theory
- Academic degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Doctoral advisor
- Julian Schwinger
- Student of
- Julian Schwinger
- Field of work
- theoretical physics
- Image
- WalterKohnGraz21042006 1.jpg
Show 10 more facts
- Commons category
- Walter Kohn
- date of birth
- 1923-03-09
- Erdős number
- 3
- date of death
- 2016-04-19
- cause of death
- laryngeal cancer
- P8168
- Rockwell
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
- manner of death
- natural causes
- interested in
- physics
Sources (6)
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Encyclopedic overview
A banner on a lightpole at the University of California, Santa Barbara, commemorating Walter Kohn being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998.
Walter Kohn ( German pronunciation: [ˈvaltɐ ˈkoːn]; March 9, 1923 – April 19, 2016) was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to understanding the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving the electronic density (rather than the many-body wavefunction). This computational simplification led to more accurate calculations on complex systems as well as many new insights, and it has become an essential tool for materials science, condensed-phase physics, and the chemical physics of atoms and molecules.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Walter Kohn” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.