Despite these difficulties, approximation methods introduced by the English physicist Douglas R. Hartree, the Russian physicist Vladimir Fock, and others in the 1920s and 1930s have achieved considerable success. Such schemes start by assuming that each electron moves independently in an average electric field because of the nucleus…

The Hartree-Fock equation, improved by him in 1930, became a basic approximation method for calculations involving multielectron atoms in quantum chemistry. He also introduced the Fock representation (1928) for a quantum oscillator, particularly important in quantum field theory; the Fock space with varying dimensions (1932) to…

…Vladimir Fock, is called the Hartree-Fock method and is widely used to describe electrons in atoms, molecules, and solids.