Walter Kohn, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has passed away on April 19.
He is considered as the father of Density Functional Theory (DFT). If you have done any computational chemistry or band structure calculation in solid state physics, you will have seen DFT in one form or another. It has become an indispensable technique to be able to accurately arrive at a theoretical description of many systems.
Zz.
Rest in Peace. He was 50 years ahead of time: massive practical implementation of DFT only started in the 90s when the computational power was big enough to do such calculations.
ReplyDeleteMaybe with quantum computers we will not need DFT, but at the moment there is no alternative.