Portrait of Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) Austrian physicist. Schrodinger is best known for his work on atomic structure. In 1926 he published a paper in which he stated that electrons orbited a nucleus in the form of a wave, and that an orbit could only form where a standing wave would exist. This proved that electrons could only inhabit discrete shells, the mathematical proof being known as the Schrodinger wave equation. In 1933, Schrodinger shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Dirac. He spent the war years in Britain and Ireland, returning to his birthplace, Vienna, in 1956.