Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961)

Erwin Schrodinger was born on August 12, 1887 in Erdberg, Vienna, Austria. His father was a botanist, and his grandfather had been a chemist. Schrodinger attended school at the Akademisches Gymnasium in 1898. Here, he not only studied science, but also the logic of ancient grammar and some German poetry. In 1906, after finishing at the Gymnasium, Schrodinger went to the University of Vienna where he studied under Franz Serafin Exner and Fritz Hasenöhrl. It was here that he gained his strong background and mastery of eigenvalue problems in quantum physics which he would later use and win a Nobel Prize. In 1910, he graduated from the University of Vienna and became Exner's assistant. In 1920 he took an academic position at the University of Zurich where he researched many subjects of theoretical modern physics such as problems with thermodynamics and atomic spectra.

In 1926, Schrodinger published a paper called "Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem" (Quantization as an Eigenvalue Problem). It was in this paper that Schrodinger derived his famous Schrodinger's Equation, or the wave equation for time independent systems. He showed that this derivation gave the correct energy eigenvalues for a hydrogen atom. During this same year, he submitted papers, solving the eigenvalues for a harmonic oscillator, a rigid rotator, and a diatomic molecule. In 1927, Schrodinger left Vienna to join Max Planck in Germany, but left after several years and went to England, Princeton, and back to Austria. After the Nazi occupation of Austria during World War 2, Schrodinger was asked to help establish the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland. He became the Director of the School for Theoretical Physics for 17 years, and even became a naturalized Irish citizen. Over these 17 years, he wrote 50 papers on numerous topics, including the unified field theory. In 1955 Schrodinger retired and moved back to Vienna. Six years later, on January 4, 1961 Erwin Schrodinger died of tuberculosis.

Schrodinger's largest contribution to the physics community is actually the central theory of quantum mechanics. It is Schrodinger's Equation which gives the correct eigenvalues for certain wavefunctions. Basically solving this equation gives the probabilities of possible measurements, or where the particle could be found within the system. The Schrodinger Equation is most commonly seen as HΨ = EΨ. Another famous problem is Schrodinger's cat in which he proposed a problem of a cat in a box isolated from external interference to explain that knowing the state of the cat (dead or alive) could only be done with the observer interfering with the experiment. He used this to explain the idea of particles existing in such isolated states that the observer could not possibly know the state unless they interfered with it, so the observer was entangled with the state of the particle.

References:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1933/schrodinger-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation

Photos:
http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/bond/pictures/portrait-schrodinger.jpg
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/webprojects2000/plewis/schrodin.gif
http://www.nearingzero.net/screen_res/nz267.jpg