Douglas Hartree
| Douglas Hartree | |
|---|---|
| Born | Douglas Rayner Hartree 27 March 1897 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK |
| Died | 12 February 1958 (aged 60) Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields |
numerical analysis atomic physics |
| Institutions |
University of Manchester Ministry of Supply University of Cambridge |
| Alma mater | St John's College, Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor | Ralph H. Fowler |
| Doctoral students |
|
| Known for | |
| Notable awards | Fellow of the Royal Society |
Douglas Rayner Hartree PhD, FRS (27 March 1897 – 12 February 1958) was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the construction of a differential analyser using Meccano.
Douglas Hartree was born in Cambridge, England. His father, William, was a lecturer in engineering at Cambridge University and his mother, Eva Rayner, was president of the National Council of Women and mayor of the city of Cambridge. One of his great-grandfathers was Samuel Smiles; another was the marine engineer William Hartree, partner of John Penn. He was the oldest of three sons, although his two younger brothers did not survive to adulthood. He attended St John's College, Cambridge but the first world war interrupted his studies. He joined a group working on anti-aircraft ballistics under A. V. Hill, where he gained considerable skill and an abiding interest in practical calculation and numerical methods for differential equations, executing most of his own work with pencil and paper. After the end of World War I, Hartree returned to Cambridge graduating in 1922 with a Second Class degree in natural sciences.
In 1921, a visit by Niels Bohr to Cambridge inspired Hartree to apply his numerical skills to Bohr's theory of the atom, for which he obtained his PhD in 1926 – his advisor was Ernest Rutherford. With the publication of Schrödinger's equation in the same year, Hartree was able to apply his knowledge of differential equations and numerical analysis to the new quantum theory. He derived the Hartree equations for the distribution of electrons in an atom and proposed the self-consistent field method for their solution. The wavefunctions from this theory did not satisfy the Pauli exclusion principle for which Slater showed that determinantal functions are required. V. Fock published the "equations with exchange" now known as Hartree–Fock equations. These are considerably more demanding computationally even with the efficient methods Hartree proposed for the calculation of exchange contributions.
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