12 August 1887, in Vienna (Austria) - 4 January 1961, in Vienna (Austria)
In 1898, Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger entered the Akademisches Gymnaisum, one of the most prestigious secondary schools in the German-speaking world.
Between 1906 and 1910, he studied in Vienna under Franz Serafin Exner and Friedrich Hasenöhrl. A year later, he became Exner's assistant.
At the end of 1911, after spending a year of military service in the Austrian army, he returned to his former institute of physics as Exner's assistant, teaching physics and participating in the laboratories conducted by Exner.
In 1914, he was qualified to become Privatdozent, but the First World War postponed his career in physics to return to army service.
In 1917, he became a professor of meteorology at the officers' Academy, which left him plenty of time to read professional literature and work on scientific problems.
In 1918, he received an offer to take up a professorship in theoretical physics at the University of Chermivtsi, but after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the city was left in another country, so he turned down the offer. However, her difficult financial situation due to her meagre salary and the bankruptcy of the family business forced her to look for a new job, even abroad.
An opportunity arose when, in 1919, Max Wien, head of the Institute of Physics at the University of Jena, invited him to become assistant professor of theoretical physics and he accepted, but the position only lasted about four months because, in 1920, he accepted a position as extraordinary professor of physics at the University of Stuttgart's Technical College. Despite high inflation, he was offered a large salary increase, but other institutions, such as the universities of Wroclaw, Hamburg, and Vienna, soon offered him better conditions and the position of professor of theoretical physics.
In the end, Schrödinger opted for the University of Wrocaw, although, once again, the position did not last long. Shortly afterward, he accepted a position as head of the prestigious Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich in 1921.
In 1926 he proposed his non-relativistic quantum atomic model. In this model, electrons were originally seen as a standing wave of matter whose amplitude decayed rapidly as it exceeded the atomic radius.
In the same year, he published an article entitled ‘Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem’ in the prestigious journal ‘Annalen del Physik’ on the quantization of the eigenvector problem of wave mechanics, which was to become the Schrödinger Equation.
In 1927, the notoriety generated by his groundbreaking work led to Schrödinger becoming Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Berlin, which had become vacant after Max Planck's resignation and after beating Arnold Sommerfeld in the application process. In Berlin, he found friends and allies who shared his conservative view of quantum mechanics and did not recognise the interpretation put forward by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Max von Laue, and others (the so-called ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’).
That same year he attended the 5th Solvay Congress, devoted to the structure and properties of the atomic nucleus, held at the Free University of Brussels.
In 1933 Hitler came to power and decided to leave Germany when the physicist Frederick Lindemann invited him to accompany him to Magdalen College, Oxford University. Shortly afterward he discovered that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Paul Dirac, for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.
The fact that his position at Magdalen College, Oxford did not entail teaching work, that at Oxford he focused mainly on letters and theology rather than theoretical physics, that he had to make a public life, the scandal over his personal life as he lived with two women and that grants for immigrant scientists were eliminated, led him to accept a position as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Graz (Austria).
In 1935, after extensive correspondence with his friend Albert Einstein, he proposed to publish the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat, intended to illustrate the problems of the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics when applied to the description of phenomena on a macroscopic scale.
In 1938 the Anschluss or annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany took place and Schrödinger got into trouble due to his escape from Bernin in 1933 and his anti-Nazi political positions which led to his dismissal from his post. He moved to Rome, then back to Oxford, and moved to Ghent.
In 1940 he received an invitation to help set up the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, promoted by the Irish Prime Minister at the time, so he moved to become the director of the School of Theoretical Physics. He stayed in Ireland for 17 years, acquired citizenship, and wrote more than 50 publications on various subjects (biology, history of science, etc.).
He retired in 1955 and went to live in Vienna to devote his last years to mathematical physics, general relativity, theory of everything, and metaphysics.
He also became a recognised expert for his important contributions to the field of colour.
