Kohn, Walter

Walter Kohn, (born March 9, 1923, Vienna, Austria—died April 19, 2016, Santa Barbara, California, U.S.), Austrian-born American physicist who, with John A. Pople, received the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The award recognized their individual work on computations in quantum chemistry. Kohn’s share of the prize acknowledged his development of the density-functional theory, which made it possible to apply the complicated mathematics of quantum mechanics to the description and analysis of the chemical bonding between atoms.

Having emigrated from his native Austria, Kohn received a master’s degree from the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) in 1946. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1948 and taught there in 1948–50. He became a professor of physics at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 1950, and he held professorships at the University of California at San Diego (1960–79) and the University of California at Santa Barbara (1979–91), becoming emeritus in 1991.

Kohn’s work centred on the use of quantum mechanics to understand electron bonding between atoms to form molecules. Since its development in the 1920s, quantum mechanics had proven a powerful tool for understanding the interactions of atomic particles with each other and with radiation. Quantum mechanics predicts probabilities in matter (wave functions); however, the mathematical calculations necessary to describe the probability states for electrons in an atomic or molecular system were far too complex to be useful to scientists. In the 1960s, however, Kohn discovered that the total energy of an atomic or molecular system described by quantum mechanics could be calculated if the spatial distribution (density) of all electrons within that system were known. It was not necessary, then, to describe the probable motions for each individual electron within such a system but merely to know the average electron density located at each point within a system. As developed by other researchers, Kohn’s approach, the density-functional theory, greatly simplified the computations needed to understand the electron bonding between atoms within molecules. The method’s simplicity enables researchers to map the geometrical structure of even very large molecules and to predict complex enzymatic and other chemical reactions.