Schrödinger’s Equation

Over the period 1925–1926, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Pasqual Jordan, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger discovered “modern” quantum theory almost simultaneously. Schrödinger’s first steps were rather different from Heisenberg’s. Schrödinger turned de Broglie’s 1923 idea of matter waves into a mathematical theory connecting them to the eigenvalue problem of partial differential operators – a prospering topic in mathematical physics at the time: eigenmodes and discrete eigenvalues fitted well with the discreteness of spectral lines. Schrödinger found the partial differential equation which governed all that.