Walter Kohn

Born on 9 March 1923 in Vienna, Walter Kohn was a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian American chemist and physicist. Kohn was sent to the UK in 1939 as part of the Kindertransport effort, which helped refugee Jewish children escape Nazi Germany. The following year, he went to Canada, where he was able to study physics and mathematics at the University of Toronto, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1945 and 1946, respectively. Kohn then transferred to Harvard University, where he earned his PhD in physics in 1948. Kohn held faculty posts at Harvard, the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), and the University of California, San Diego, before joining the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1979. There he became the founding director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. Over his career Kohn collaborated with some of the world’s top scientists at such institutions as the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Bell Labs, where he was assistant to William Shockley, coinventor of the transistor. Kohn worked primarily in mathematical, solid-state, and condensed-matter physics. His most important contribution was his development of density functional theory, a quantum mechanical modeling method used to investigate the electronic structure of many-body systems. That work earned Kohn a share of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry . In addition to his research and teaching, Kohn was active in efforts to defend scientists’ human rights and protect the environment. He died at age 93 in 2016. Here is the obituary that appeared in Physics Today. (Photo credit: Bill Brooks, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 9 March 1923