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Biography: Erwin Schrodinger Schrödinger was a student at Vienna from 1906 and taught there for ten years from 1910 to 1920 with a break for military service in World War I. He went to Zurich in 1921 where he made very important contributions to wave mechanics and the general theory of relativity in a series of papers in 1926. Wave mechanics, proposed by Schrödinger in these papers, was the second formulation of quantum theory, the first being matrix mechanics due to Heisenberg. Schrödinger was awarded the Nobel prize for this work in 1933.
Schrödinger went to Berlin in 1927 where he succeeded Planck and became a colleague of Einstein's.
Although he was a Catholic Schrödinger decided in 1933 that he couldn't live in a country in which persecution of Jews had become a national policy. He left, spending time in Austria, Britain and Italy before settling in Dublin, Ireland in 1940.
His study of Greek science and philosophy is summarized in Nature and the Greeks (1954). He remained in Dublin until he retired in 1956 when he returned to Vienna and wrote his last book Meine Weltansicht (1961) expressing his own metaphysical outlook. Although most famous as a quantum physicist, Schrödinger made a seminal contribution to molecular biology and the philosophy of biology. His short masterpiece What is Life? contained accurately guiding conjectures as to the nature of genetic material, This book influenced the thinking of James Watson, the molecular biologist who, with Francis Crick, won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the structure of the genetic material DNA.
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