Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, more commonly known as Erwin Schrödinger, was an Austrian physicist and theoretical biologist. One of the founders of quantum mechanics, he is known for the Schrödinger equation and his brilliant contributions to the wave theory of matter. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Paul Dirac in 1933.
Erwin Schrödinger was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1887. He actually had a Bavarian family that had settled in Vienna long ago. Exceptionally talented and highly educated, he learnt almost everything, including the history of Italian painting and most of the recent theories related to theoretical physics.
He became an artillery officer in World War I. He took several positions at Stuttgart, Breslau, and Zurich from 1920 onwards. Zurich proved to be the most productive period for Schrödinger. The tremendous discovery of the Schrodinger Wave Equation took place in 1926. It explained how the quantum state of a physical system changes in time.
Schrödinger went to Berlin in 1927 as the successor of Max Planck. Berlin used to be a centre of scientific activity, but he was soon made to leave for Oxford, from where he went to Princeton, and then got back to Austria.
When the Anschluss was over, Erwin Schrödinger made an escape to Italy and then made it to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. He worked there until his retirement in 1955. He continued to write several important papers. Schrödinger died of tuberculosis in 1961.
He was 73 years old. The Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics in Vienna was named after him in 1993.
