Walter Kohn
Sign in to saveAmerican physicist (1923–2016)
AI overview
Walter Kohn was an American physicist who lived from 1923 to 2016 and made significant contributions to the field of physics. His work has had important applications in science and technology, though the specific details of his achievements would require additional context to fully explain.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1923
- Died
- 2016-04-19
- 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
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
Article
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.
Gallery (4)
Connections
Categories
1923 births2016 deaths20th-century American physicists20th-century Austrian physicistsAmerican computational chemistsAmerican deistsAmerican fellows of the Royal SocietyAmerican Nobel laureatesAmerican people of Austrian-Jewish descentAmerican theoretical chemistsAustrian emigrants to the United StatesAustrian Jews