월터 콘

소개

월터 콘(영어: Walter Kohn, 1923년 3월 9일 ~ 2016년 4월 19일)은 오스트리아 제1공화국 출신의 미국 이론물리학자, 이론화학자이다. 1998년에 밀도범함수 이론을 개발한 공로로 존 포플과 함께 노벨 화학상을 수상했다.

Walter Kohn was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to understanding the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving the electronic density. This computational simplification led to more accurate calculations on complex systems as well as many new insights, and it has become an essential tool for materials science, condensed-phase physics, and the chemical physics of atoms and molecules.