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A banner on a light pole in the University of California, Santa Barbara, commemorating that Walter Kohn won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998.

Walter Kohn (born March 9, 1923 in Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist who was awarded, with John A. Pople, the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played a leading role in the development of the density functional theory, which made it possible to incorporate quantum mechanical effects in the electronic density (rather than through its many-body wavefunction). This computational simplification led to many insights and became an essential tool for electronic materials, atomic and molecular structure.

Kohn has also made significant contributions to semiconductor physics, and in 1961 he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize by the American Physical Society for this work.

Kohn was awarded his B.A. degree in mathematics and physics by the University of Toronto in 1945; he was awarded an M.A. degree in applied mathematics by Toronto in 1946. Kohn was awarded a Ph.D. degree in physics by Harvard University in 1948. He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University from 1950-1960, where he did much of his seminal work on semiconductor physics. He moved to the newly founded University of California at San Diego in 1960, where he remained until 1979. He then accepted the Founding Director's position at the new Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. He took his present position as a professor at University of California at Santa Barbara in 1984; he is currently a Professor Emeritus.

In 1957, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

• "Quantum Chemistry Comes of Age," The Chemical Educator, Vol. 5, No. 3, S1430-4171(99)06333-7, DOI: 10.1007/s00897990333a, © 2000 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.
• Freeview video interview with Walter Kohn by the Vega Science Trust
• Official homepage of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998
• Kohn's faculty website at University of California-Santa Barbara. Retrieved November 11, 2006.