QFS 2016 Book of Abstracts

Abstracts

Walter Kohn Session Chair: Paul Leiderer

(9.3.1923 - 19.4.2016)

Walter Kohn was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, along with John Pople, the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understanding of the electronic properties of materials. Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to incorporate quantum mechanical effects into electronic density calculations (rather than through its many-body wavefunction). This computational simplification led to many insights and has become an essential tool for studying electronic materials, as well as atomic and molecular structures.

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