Thursday, March 25, 2010

A great quantum many-body theorist

Today is Ada Lovelace day [I thank Ben Powell for bringing this to my attention] and so I asked myself, "Which woman has made the greatest contribution to quantum many-body theory?"

Maria Goeppert-Mayer is best known for receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics for her role in developing the nuclear shell model.

However, she did more. In 1938, together with Sklar, she did one of the first non -empirical quantum chemistry calculations: the excited states of benzene. This is in a widely cited Journal of Chemical Physics paper.
By at
Labels: , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Lecture on Debye model for solids

 I just finished preparing my undergraduate lecture on the Debye model for solids. Here are my slides . The course is a third-year course on...

  • A Ph.D without scholarship?
    An interesting and controversial question for Ph.D's in science and engineering is too what extent students should be expected to have ...
  • Nobel Prize predictions for 2025
     This week Nobel Prizes will be announced. I have not done predictions since 2020 . This is a fun exercise. It is also good to reflect on w...
  • What is Herzberg-Teller coupling?
    Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro...