Kohn. Walter

Kohn, Walter (1923- ). Awarded Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1998 jointly with John A. Pople for their pioneering contributions in developing methods that can be used for theoretical studies of the properties of molecules and the chemical processes in which they are involved. He performs his research at the University of California at Santa Barbara. 

Important insights have been developed using approximate methods that were not highly precise quantitatively, and excellent high-level methods for solving the Schrodinger equation have been developed, but the methods still have used approximations. A Nobel Prize in 1998 went to John Pople and Walter Kohn for their different successful approaches to this problem. Earlier methods used many... 

The bond that developed between quantum physics and quantum chemistry, that led to the award of a big chemistry prize to the physicist Walter Kohn in 1998, developed not without trial. Here I give an account of it. An element in this bond has been a friendship between Walter Kohn and me. My having reached 80 first, he has already kindly spoken of this [1], Now it is my turn. 

Walter Kohn s appearance at the Boulder Theoretical Chemistry Conference of 1975 was memorable. On June 24, he presented a formal talk, in which he outlined DFT to the assemblage of skeptical chemists. There were many sharp questions and a shortage of time, so the chair of the conference decided to schedule a special session for the afternoon of June 26. With quite a crowd for an informal extra session like this, Walter held forth on his proof. In his hand, he held a reprint of the HK paper,... 

Walter Kohn has been a great help to many scientists over many years, an expert consultant and helpmate and a fine, unobtrusive, even-handed host of good meetings in lovely places. We thank him. In recent years I have discussed with him (among other things), circulant orbitals, the monotonic density theorem, and the information theory point of view on what constitutes an atom in a molecule, the latter during a stolen few minutes in a Stockholm hotel in December of 1999 [6]. Walter may or may not like chemistry [7], and he claims not to have studied chemistry in the university. But what does one call a great teacher of chemical principles I would say, CHEMIST, full caps. 

RGP was delighted to be Walter Kohn s guest. See P. Hohenberg, in Walter Kohn Personal Stories and Anecdotes Told by Friends and Collaborators, M. Scheffler and P. Weinberger (Eds.), Springer, Berlin, 2003, p. 120. 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Prof Walter Kohn and Prof John A. Pople. The Laureates have each made pioneering contributions in developing methods that can be... 

Walter Kohn United States density function theory ... 

For his discovery, leading up to the development of practical density functional models, Walter Kohn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. 

One of us (A.V.G.) would like to thank Profs Leonid Ivanov and Elena Ivanova for their help and for the possibility of using the atomic numerical code used in this work, and Profs Walter Kohn, Ilya Kaplan, and Andreas Theophilou for helpful comments. 

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