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Walter Kohn
Sign in to saveAmerican physicist (1923–2016)
OverviewAI-generated
Walter Kohn (1923–2016) was an Austrian-Canadian-American physicist, chemist, and university teacher. Born in Vienna, he held citizenship in Austria, Canada, and the United States. He received his Doctor of Philosophy under the supervision of Julian Schwinger. Kohn’s field of work was theoretical physics, and his notable work includes density functional theory. He was employed by the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of California, San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Kohn 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 received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal, the Three Physicists Prize, and the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize. He died in Santa Barbara of laryngeal cancer.
Synthesized by Vinony from 38 facts across 8 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Wikiquote, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1923
- Works
- 6
Top works
- Walter Kohn
- Perspectives on the crisis of UNESCO
- Walter Kohn
- Collisions of light nuclei
- Collisions of light nuclei
via Open Library + Wikidata
Music · MusicBrainz
- Type
- Group
- Origin
- Czechia
- Active from
- 2014
Discography
- Hlavou dolů2014
- Žijem Jen Jednou2015
- Hard2016
via MusicBrainz · CC0
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Self-Consistent Equations Including Exchange and Correlation Effects
· 1965 · cited 59,213x
- Inhomogeneous Electron Gas
· 1964 · cited 49,242x
- The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields
· 1983 · cited 31,494x
- A global reference for human genetic variation
· 2015 · cited 17,776x
- Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
· 2020 · cited 15,955x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “Paris somehow lends itself to conceptual new ideas. I don't know why it is. There is a certain magic to that city.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Nobel Prize
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry1998
“for his development of the density-functional theory”
Shared · 1/2 portion
~8 min read
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.