Douglas Hartree

Douglas Hartree (1897–1958) was an English mathematician and physicist who developed numerical methods and the self-consistent field approach to atomic structure that helped lead to the Hartree–Fock method.

Vladimir Fock: A Soviet physicist who introduced antisymmetrized wavefunctions into the self-consistent field method. Fock added electron exchange to Hartree’s approximation, producing the Hartree–Fock method.
Hartree method: An approximation that calculates each electron’s motion in the average field of the other electrons. This is Hartree’s central computational scheme for estimating atomic wavefunctions.
Schrödinger equation: The equation governing how quantum-mechanical wavefunctions evolve or form stationary states. Hartree sought approximate solutions for multi-electron atoms where direct solutions were impractical.
Atomic structure: The arrangement and quantum states of electrons around an atomic nucleus. Calculating atomic electron distributions was the primary target of Hartree’s self-consistent method.
John E. Lennard-Jones: A British theoretical chemist who applied quantum mechanics to molecular structure and chemical bonding. His molecular applications extended the self-consistent field ideas Hartree developed for atoms.
Self-consistent field: An iterative method that refines a field and the states it produces until they agree with each other. Hartree repeatedly updated electron fields until the resulting orbitals generated the same field.
Wavefunction: A mathematical function encoding a quantum system’s state and the probabilities of measurement outcomes. Hartree’s calculations approximated atomic wavefunctions for individual electrons.
Numerical weather prediction: Forecasting atmospheric conditions by numerically solving equations for fluid motion and heat transfer. Hartree applied computational expertise to early efforts at forecasting weather numerically.
Ernest Rutherford: A New Zealand-born physicist who established the nuclear model of the atom and led the Cavendish Laboratory. Hartree studied under Rutherford at Cambridge, where atomic structure became a central research problem.
Hartree–Fock method: A quantum approximation that represents a many-electron state by one antisymmetric Slater determinant. It extends Hartree’s self-consistent calculation by enforcing electron exchange through antisymmetry.

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