Biography:Egil Hylleraas

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Egil Hylleraas
1934 at London
Born
Egil Andersen Hylleraas

(1898-05-15)15 May 1898
Hylleråsen, Norway
Died28 October 1965(1965-10-28) (aged 67)
Alma materUniversity of Oslo
Known forSolving the helium atom
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical Physics
Quantum mechanics
InstitutionsChristian Michelson Institute, Bergen
University of Oslo

Egil Andersen Hylleraas (15 May 1898 – 28 October 1965) was a Norwegian theoretical physicist known for creating a method for predicting the ground state energy of two-electron atoms and trial wave functions for many-electron atoms.

Biography

Egil Andersen Hylleraas was born in the town of Hylleråsen, Norway in 1898.[1] Hylleraas was the youngest of ten children.[1]

He worked as a logger until 1916 where he attended secondary school in Oslo. In 1918, he joined the University of Oslo majoring in physics in 1924.[1] He later worked as a school teacher.[1]

Hylleraas started publishing on crystallography. His work attracted the attention of Max Born, who invited him to join him at the University of Göttingen.[1] Hylleraas worked there on quantum mechanics and on the helium atom.[1] In 1929, he published his solution to the helium atom which matched experimental values, confirming the validity of quantum mechanics for many-electron atoms.[1]

He married Magda Christiansen in 1926. They had a daughter Inger in 1927.[1]

In 1931, he took a position at the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, and in 1937 he was offered a professor position at the University of Oslo.[1]

Hylleraas was one of the founding fathers of CERN and represented Norway at the European Council for Nuclear Research,[2][non-primary source needed] which later led to the organization's establishment.

He died in 1965.[1]

Many-electrons research

In his journal Reminiscences,[3][non-primary source needed] Hylleraas referred to 1925–1930 as the Golden Age of atomic physics. It was when Bohr's theory of the atom was replaced by the new theory of quantum mechanics. By 1926, the one-electron hydrogen had been solved, and Werner Heisenberg had formulated the two-electron helium problem quantum mechanically. A simple first-order perturbation treatment still yielded considerably increased ionization potential for error with experimental measurement.[4] Max Born considered it crucial for quantum mechanics to provide a result in better agreement with experiments.


Awards

  • Gunnerus Medal (1960)[5]

Selected publications

See also

References