Born #onthisday in 1892, Louis de Broglie was a French physicist and aristocrat who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave–particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.

In 1923 de Broglie came up with a novel idea to explain the theory of atomic structures which would put the formalism of quantum mechanics on a solid ground, by proposing and developing the concept of matter waves. This eventually lead Erwin Schrödinger to postulate the Schrödinger equation, an equation that provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time.

Read more about de Broglie's life and times here: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Broglie.

#math #maths #quantummechanics #matterwaves

References
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[1] "Louis de Broglie", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Broglie

[2] "Erwin Schrödinger", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger

[3] "What is the Schrödinger Equation? A basic introduction to Quantum Mechanics", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WPA1L9uJqo