Erwin Schrödinger

Schrödinger produced the wave equation that carries his name in 1926, during a stay in the Alps, and a Nobel prize followed seven years later. He left Austria after the German annexation, having earlier published a statement of accommodation with the regime that he afterwards called cowardice, and spent seventeen years in Dublin at the institute Éamon de Valera built partly to house him. What Is Life?, written in 1944, argued that heredity must be carried by an aperiodic crystal, and both Crick and Watson credited it with pushing them toward DNA. His personal diaries, quoted by his biographer Walter Moore and re-examined publicly in 2021, record his pursuit of girls in their early teens, one of them a pupil he was tutoring.