Kohn, Walter

Kohn, Walter,

1923–2016, American physicist, b. Vienna, Austria, Ph.D. Harvard, 1948. The son of Austrian Jews, he was transported to England in a rescue convoy after Nazi Germany absorbed (1938) Austria, was later (1940) deported to and detained in Canada as an enemy alien, and then served in the Canadian army. Kohn taught at Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1950 to 1960 and at the Univ. of California, San Diego, from 1960 to 1979. He became a professor at the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, in 1979 (emeritus from 1991 until his death). In 1998 Kohn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John PoplePople, Sir John Anthony
, 1925–2004, British computational chemist. Trained as a mathematician at Cambridge (B.A. 1946, Ph.D. 1951), he worked at Cambridge (1951–58) and England's National Physical Laboratory (1958–64) then lived in the United States where he
..... Click the link for more information.  for his development of the density-functional theory, a method for calculating the properties of molecules that was computationally simpler than previous techniques. With the advent of supercomputers, his work became a critical tool in the field of electronic materials science and in the development of new medicines.

Kohn, Walter

(1923– ) physicist; born in Vienna, Austria. He escaped the Nazis and emigrated to England (1939), then Canada (1940). He came to Harvard in 1946, taught there (1948–50), then moved to the Carnegie-Mellon Institute (1950–60), where he contributed to the theory of electronic structure of metals. He joined the University of California: San Diego (1960–79), and continued his work on the physics of solids. He directed Santa Barbara's Institute for Theoretical Physics (1979–84), then became a physics professor at the University of California: Santa Barbara (1984).