Erwin Schrödinger

Schrodinger had a liking for several women in his life, including the wife of his colleague Hilde March. His daughter Ruth Georgia Erica was born out of his wedlock with Hilde in Oxford, in 1934. In his years in Dublin he had two other daughters from two different Irish women.

The eminent scientist breathed his last on January 4, 1961 after suffering from a long bout of tuberculosis. He was interred at a Catholic cemetery in Alpbach town of Austria.

Erwin was born on August 12, 1887 to Rudolf Schrodinger and Emily Bauer in Vienna. He had a mixed parentage; his father being Austrian and his mother being half-British and half-Austrian.

His father ran a tiny linoleum factory; he was a well-educated man who studied Chemistry, Italian painting and Botany and published different papers in plant phylogeny.

Schrodinger was home-schooled till the age of ten and was well-conversed in both German and English.

After graduating from ‘Akademisches Gymnasium’, he was accepted in the ‘University of Vienna’ in 1906 and was greatly influenced by Fritz Hasenohrl’s lectures in theoretical physics.

On 20th May, 1910 Schrodinger received his Doctorate for his dissertation, ‘On the conduction of electricity on the surface of insulators in moist air’.

During the phase of 1915-1920 he continued his research work along with his military duties and published several research papers. He also taught a course in meteorology in Hungary.

In 1920 he took up the position of an assistant to Max Wein and later went on to ‘University of Stuttgart’ and ‘University of Zurich’.

During his six-year-stay in the ‘University of Zurich’, he enjoyed the companionship of some of his esteemed colleagues like Peter Debye and Hermann Weyl. His papers mostly emphasized on thermodynamics problems, atomic spectra, the nature of specific heats in solids and colour theory.

In 1926, in the course of six months, at the age of 39, he put forth his findings on quantum wave mechanics in his papers, which later came to be known as Schrodinger’s wave equation.

In 1927, Erwin accepted an invitation and succeeded Max Planck, the inventor of quantum hypothesis in the ‘University of Berlin’, where he met the famous theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.

Schrodinger laid the foundation of wave mechanics which is fundamental in understanding the behaviour of light and subatomic particles. In the theory known as ‘Schrodinger Equation’, he explained that the different stages of atom’s electrons can be described and their state of energy can also be predicted via wave equation. His findings were published in the paper ‘Quantisierungals Eigenwert problem’ or ‘Quantization as an Eigenvalue Problem’.