This book describes the many aspects of the life and scientific work of Erwin Schrödinger, who, perhaps more than anyone else, serves to represent the whole of modern physics. The contributions to the book are from many hands, and so it seemed useful to me to precede them with a short note giving an uncontroversial account of his life which will serve as a framework into which they can be fitted. Such a collection as this still leaves out many aspects of Schrödinger's thought, for it considers his philosophy only in passing, his poetry not at all and ignores his wide and deep interest in sculpture and painting and in the classics.

Schrödinger was born in Vienna on August 12, 1887, and entered the University there to read physics in 1906. He worked there as an assistant from 1910 till his war service, and again after the war. Some short term appointments at Jena, Stuttgart and Breslau led up to his appointment to the chair of theoretical physics in Zürich in 1921. He was already treating a wide range of topics, but concentrating on atomic theory, for the old quantum theory had now entered on its heroic phase of final collapse. His six papers founding wave mechanics came at the end of his Zürich years, and in 1927 he went to the chair in Berlin, to remain there till the advent of Hitler in 1933.