简介

Walter Kohn is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 13, 1998 for his development of the density-functional theory. Walter Kohn is a condensed matter theorist who has made seminal contributions to the understanding of the electronic structure of materials. He played the leading role in the development of the density functional theory, which has revolutionized scientists' approach to the electronic structure of atoms, molecules and solid materials in physics, chemistry and materials science. With the advent of supercomputers, density functional theory has become an essential tool for electronic materials science. Professor Kohn has also made major contributions to the physics of semiconductors, superconductivity, surface physics and catalysis. Professor Kohn was the founding director of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Institute brings together leading scientists from throughout the world to work on major problems in theoretical physics and related fields. Under Professor Kohn's leadership it quickly developed into one of the leading research centers in physics, and has been widely copied. After earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Toronto in 1946, Kohn received his Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics and a postdoctoral fellowship with Julian Schwinger at Harvard University in 1948. This was followed by postdoctoral work at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. In the early 1950’s, he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories as an assistant to the group that developed the transistor. He has taught at many universities and done collaborative research around the world. He has received numerous awards including the Niels Bohr/Unesco Gold Medal, the United States National Medal of Science and the Richard Prange Prize. In recent years, he was an active member of the U.S. government’s Basic Energy Science Advisory Committee and as a consultant with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In 2005 he produced a documentary on solar power entitled “The Power of the Sun” which has had worldwide distribution in multiple languages. Currently he is working on Macular Degeneration, renewable energies and global warming.