Walter Kohn

Walter Kohn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1998 “for his development of the density-functional theory” together with John A. Pople “for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry”.

Walter Kohn was born in Vienna, Austria in 1923. He was enabled by the so-called Kindertransport to escape to England in August 1939.  During WWII he served in the Canadian Army.

After earning his Bachelors and Masters degrees (partly while in the military) from the University of Toronto, 1946, Kohn received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Harvard University followed by  post –doctoral work at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

In the early 1950’s, he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories as an assistant to William Shockley, the leader of the group that invented the transistor.  He has taught at many universities and done collaborative research around the world.

In 1979 he was appointed as the founding director of the National Science Foundation’s Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He has received numerous awards including the Niels Bohr/Unesco Gold Medal and the United States National Medal of Science; his role in creating the most widely used theory of the electronic structure of matter (Density Functional Theory) earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1998.

Until 2007, he was an active member of the U.S. government’s Basic Energy Science Advisory Committee. His current projects have been consulting with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and research on solar energy. His documentary on solar power, “The Power of the Sun”, has received world-wide distribution in 10 languages.