Recollections of a Long Friendship

Abstract

I think the first time Donna and I met Walter was in Paris the summer of 1963. I was finishing a postdoc there at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and he was coming for a sabbatical year’s stay. Shortly thereafter we left Paris, in a display of spectacularly bad timing, missing the excitement of that year’s first work on density functional theory, which ultimately led to Walter’s Nobel Prize. But I do want to take credit for an important contribution we made to that work. We turned over our Paris rental apartment to Pierre Hohenberg, who was the one who wrote the seminal first paper on density functional theory with Walter that year.