Source krishnapath.org
Erwin Schrödinger was born in Erdberg, Austria, to a father of Austrian and a mother of mixed Austrian-English descent. He studied physics in Vienna under Franz Exner, whose assistant he became in 1911. He was influenced early by the writings of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer resulting, among other things, in his interest in color theory. Three of his papers on color were written in Vienna after he concluded his military service in 1918 and before assuming a position at the University of Zürich in 1921. There he published six more papers on color and vision. His interest in color, which did not extend beyond his years in Zürich, apparently was due to his deep involvement with the works of Schopenhauer who in turn was influenced by Goethe.
In Zürich, Schrödinger did his most important work, on quantum wave mechanics, for which he shared with Paul Dirac the 1933 Nobel Prize in physics. In 1940, Schrödinger moved to Ireland, where he remained until his retirement in 1955. Then he returned to Vienna. Among his achievements is the thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s Cat.
60.1 Color Theory
- (a)
He offered the first mathematical proof [1] of the theorem sketched by Wilhelm Ostwald that, under any illuminant, the object-color tristimulus locus is contained by a two-dimensional manifold generated by reflectances that are 1 or 0 at each wavelength and with at most two transitions between 0 and 1. Robert Luther later called these reflectances “optimal colors”. The maximality of two transitions depends on the convexity of the spectrum locus, as is clear in his very brief proof: “If a pigment has three transition points that in the chromaticity diagram are not located on a straight line, by moving the transition points its reflectance can be changed in a manner that results in a lighter pigment of the same chromaticity coordinates. Therefore, it cannot be optimal.”
- (b)
He was the first to use differential geometry for color space, to import brightness as one of the space’s coordinates, and to infer total color difference (in units of just-noticeable differences) through arc length along geodesics [2, 3].
- (c)
He was the first to offer a mathematically detailed connection of the Young-Helmholtz three-color theory and Hering’s opponent-color theory [4], after Helmholtz offered such a concept in 1896 and von Kries that of a zone theory in 1905.
Schrödinger depicted on an Austrian bank note