Professor Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, c mid-20th century

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, born 12 August 1887 in Vienna, died 4 January 1961. Schrödinger was an Austrian-Irish theoretical physicist who worked on quantum theory. He is known prominently for Schrödinger’s equation (1925) and Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment (1935). He won in 1933, with Paul Dirac, the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on quantum mechanics. Schrödinger studied at the University of Vienna, obtaining his PhD in 1910, and further his Habilitation in 1914. Between 1914 and 1918, he worked as a commissioned officer in the Austrian fortress artillery. Schrödinger married Annemarie Bertel in 1920. However, he was known to have a mistress, Hilde March, whom which he lived with, and had a daughter with. In 1921, he worked at the University of Zurich and then at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin from 1927. After 1933, with the rise of National Socialism in Germany and persecution against Jewish people, Schrödinger left Germany as he strongly disapproved of antisemitism. He worked at Magdalen College, Oxford, but after he lived with both his wife and mistress, he was dismissed from Oxford. He was offered a position at the University of Edinburgh but due to visa issues delays, he eventually took up a position at the University of Graz in Austria in 1936. During this time, he came up with his Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment after discussion with Einstein. After Anschluss, in 1938, Schrödinger had to leave Austria due to his prior vocal anti-Nazism stance. He fled to Ireland, where he established the Institute for Advanced Studied in Dublin. Schrödinger, his wife, and mistress all lived together in Ireland. He became a naturalised citizen of Ireland in 1948, staying in Dublin until his retirement in 1955. In 1956, he returned to Vienna. Schrödinger had suffered from tuberculosis several times in his life, and in 1961, he died of tuberculosis, aged 73. Following Schrödinger’s death, accusations of paedophilia and sexual assault of minors were reported, and in 2022 Trinity College Dublin reported that they would recommend the lecture theatre named for him since 1990s be renamed.