Dr. Erwin Schrödinger
Schrödinger was a Fellow of Magdalen College from 1933 for five years. The following is an extract from the Magdalen College website ( http://www.magd.ox.ac.uk ):
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was born in August 1887 in Vienna. The son of a botanist, he held academic posts at Stuttgart, Breslau and Zurich before becoming Professor of Theoretical Physics at Berlin between 1927 and 1933. He had to leave when the Nazis came to power and came to Magdalen College as a Fellow in 1933, staying for five years before moving to America. In 1940 he re-crossed the Atlantic, becoming Senior Professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933, within a few weeks of his arrival at Oxford.
He returned to Vienna in 1956 to take up a chair in Physics and died in January 1961. Among his published works were What is Life (1944), Science and Humanism: physics in our time (1952), Nature and the Greeks (1954), Mind and Matter (1958). Schrödinger was one of the joint founders (with Heisenberg) of what became known as the 'new' quantum theory, which completed the revolution in ideas which Max Planck and Niels Bohr had pioneered - a quantitatively useful account of atomic structure.
In 1924 de Broglie had boldly suggested that, just as it was necessary to consider electromagnetic radiation sometimes consisting of waves and sometimes as particles, so it might be expected that 'matter waves' should be associated with particles. Heisenberg's form of the theory is known as 'matrix mechanics' and Schrödinger's as 'wave mechanics'. His wave equation, expressing the wave aspects of physics is one of the great equations of physics. The 1933 Nobel Prize was shared with P.A.M Dirac.
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