Douglas R. Hartree

Douglas R. Hartree (born March 27, 1897, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.—died Feb. 12, 1958, Cambridge) was an English physicist, mathematician, and computer pioneer. At Manchester University in the mid-1930s, he built a mechanical computer for solving differential equations, based on the differential analyzer of Vannevar Bush. During World War II he was involved with the ENIAC project in the U.S. At the University of Cambridge he introduced the self-consistent field approximation scheme that is the basis for most atomic calculations and for the prevailing physical understanding of the wave mechanics of atoms. This scheme, which was generalized by Russian physicist Vladimir Fock, is called the Hartree-Fock method and is widely used to describe electrons in atoms, molecules, and solids.