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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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