Nobel Prize Recipient. Erwin Schrodinger, an Austrian physicist, received international recognition after receiving the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared jointly the covet award with British scientist Paul A.M. Dirac, and according to the Nobel Prize committee, the award was given "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory. Very popular in the scientific community, he had 41 nominations for the Nobel Prize candidacy. Born Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, he was the only child of a father, who was a factory owner, amateur painter, and botanist, and a well-educated mother, who was half Austrian and half English. His grandfather was a physicist. His mother taught him English when he was a child. Both his parents were active in their Christian faiths. He was baptized a Roman Catholic, but as he became an adult, he left this faith claiming to be atheist, yet having an interest in Eastern faiths with a higher power. Besides his interest in science, he was interest in the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. After being home schooled with a tutor until age ten, he finished his early education in public school. In 1906 he entered the University of Vienna and obtained his doctorate in 1910, upon which he accepted a research post at the university's Second Physics Institute. During World War I, he was a commissioned officer in the Austrian fortress artillery on the Italian front receiving a citation for being in battle. After the war, he became chronically ill with tuberculosis, staying in sanatoriums. In 1920 he married and went to the University of Zürich in 1921, where he remained for the next six years. As a "Johnny-come-lately" at the age of 39, he produced in a six-month period during 1926 scientific papers that gave the foundations of quantum wave mechanics. He introduced a theory describing the behavior of such a system by a wave equation that is now known as the Schrodinger Equation. Traveling to Germany in 1927, he was given the opportunity to succeed Max Plank, the inventor of the quantum hypothesis at the University of Berlin and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. He joined the prestigious facility that included Albert Einstein. By 1933 the Nazi Party was in control of Germany and were persecuting Jews. Not agreeing with the German politics, he decided to flee Germany with his family. He traveled first to his home to University of Graz in Austria, then to Oxford in Great Britain, Ghent University in Belgium, the Pontifical Academy of Science in Rome, and after given offers at universities in India, Scotland and Princeton University in the United States, he settled in October of 1939 in Ireland at the newly-opened Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. On arrival, he had less than ten dollars in his pockets and the belongings for his entire family were contained in only three suitcases. Upsetting him greatly, he spoke out when his beloved Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. Publicly, he suffered harassment from German physicists over him not accepting Nazi politics and leaving Germany. At this point, his name was placed on a list of "persons of interest" by Nazi Gestapo. Although he was very popular in the scientific community before the war, he was meeting controversy over scientific matters with other leading physicists. By the time he arrived in Ireland, he had acquired a mistress and their five-year-old daughter who lived with him and his wife in a ménage à trois. His personal life style made him not welcomed in some conservative cultures. During his years in Ireland, he had other relationships producing two more daughters. Retaining his Austrian citizenship, he became a naturalize Irish citizen in 1948 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1949. He stayed in Ireland for 15 years doing research in physics, philosophy and science history. During this time, he authored in 1944 "What Is Life," a book written for the layperson introducing molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of DNA, and today, it is still an excellent primary source to the subject of DNA. He studied colors and wrote papers on his finds. In 1949 he authored a collection of his poetry, simply "Poems." During his career, he published over 50 papers on varying subjects including science, paying attention to the philosophical aspects of science, ancient and oriental philosophical concepts, ethics, and religion. In 1951 he published his last book "My View of the World." In 1955 he retired, returning to Vienna as a professor emeritus at the university there . He died from tuberculosis and after permission was obtained from the church, he was buried in a Catholic cemetery. He will be remembered for his thought experiment called "Schrödinger's cat," which he had with Albert Einstein leading to deep theoretical discussions. In jest, a small statue of a cat is kept in the garden of his homeplace in Vienna. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received in 1920 the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences , the Italian Matteucci Medal in 1927 and the Max Planck Medal from Germany in 1937. His image was on the face of Austrian currency from 1983 to 1997. The Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematics and Physics opened in 1993 in Vienna. A moon crater was named in his honor. He and his widow did not have any children.