The Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) laid the foundation of the wave-mechanics approach to quantum

Erwin Schrödinger Credit:AIP

theory and set forth his now-famous wave equation. Schrödinger earned a doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1910. He succeeded (1927) Max Planck in the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin but left Germany in 1933 because of Nazi threats--the same year he shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Paul Dirac for his contributions to atomic theory. In 1939 he joined the newly formed Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. There he continued his studies of the application and statistical interpretation of wave mechanics, the mathematical character of the new statistics, and the relationship of these statistics to statistical thermodynamics. He also worked on problems of general relativity and cosmology and on a unified field theory.