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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The theoretical physicist Walter Kohn was awarded one-half the 1998 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his mid-1960's creation of an approach to the many-particle problem in quantum mechanics called density functional theory (DFT). DFT establishes that the ground state charge density provides a complete description of ALL the properties of any atom, molecule, or solid. This was a breakthrough (both conceptually and computationally) because it had been presumed previously that the vastly more complicated many-electron wave function was essential for this purpose. In this talk, I present a biographical sketch of Kohn's unusual educational experiences and the events in his professional career which led him to create DFT. A coda explains how the chemists came to award "their" Nobel prize to a card-carrying physicist.
