Schrodinger

Biography

Schrodinger was born in Vienna on 1887 and entered the University there to read physics in 1906. He worked there as an assistant from 1910 till his war service and again after the war.

Some shorts appointments at Jena, Stuttgart and Breslau led up to his appointment to the chair of theoretical physics in Zurich in 1921. His six papers founding wave mechanics came at the end of his Zurich years, and in 1927 he went to the chair in Berlin, to remain there till the advent of Hitler in 1933.

He chose to leave, though his own position could have been secure. He spent a short and rather unhappy time in Oxford. Even though 1933 was also the year in which he shared the Nobel prize with Dirac.

He was offered a chair in Graz in 1936. Believing that there was no real danger of an Anschluss, he accepted, only to have to leave hastily in 1938 for Rome.

In that year he had some preliminary discussions with Eamon de Valera, and in 1940 the Eire Government established the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies with Schrodinger as Director of the School of Theoretical Physics.

Fifteen fruitful years followed, his last five years were spent in his native land, where he died at Alpbach (Tyrol) on 1961.

C.W Kilmister (1987) "Schrodinger : Centenary Celebration of a Polymath" Cambridge : Cambridge University Press - page 1.