Walter Kohn (1923–2016)

Abstract

Walter Kohn, who died on April 19, 2016, once said “Physics isn’t what I do; it is what I am.” Indeed, Walter was a world-renowned physicist, winner of the 1960 Oliver E. Buckley Prize for his prediction of anomalies in the phonon spectrum in metals, the 1977 Davisson–Germer Prize with Nortan Lang for their studies of the inhomogeneous interacting electron gas at surfaces, and the 1991 Eugene Feenberg Medal for the development of density-functional theory. However, it was in Chemistry that Walter received the ultimate scientific recognition. The 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by Walter Kohn, “for his development of the density-functional theory,” and John A. Pople, “for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.” The Nobel Committee recognized Walter’s work in the 1960s with postdoctorates Pierre Hohenberg (Bell Labs) and Lu Sham (University of California, San Diego) in the development of the density-functional theory in which the properties of a many-electron system can be determined by using functionals of the spatially …