This paper gives a short description of the historicaldevelopment of ligand field theory, including a presentationof the basic ideas and of the most important results , together with, personal remembrances out of the pioneering period. . In 1951 I published under my name and the name of my friend and cOworker F.E. use (Ref. 1) our first papers concerning a theory of the term systems of complex ...

Many electronic properties of solids can now be described ab initio, thanks to the advent of powerful computers and the development of ingenious methods, such as density-functional theory (DFT) with local density (LDA) or generalized gradient (GGA) approximations, LDA+HubbardU (LDA+U), quantum chemical methods, dynamic mean-field theory, quantum Monte-Carlo simulations, and exact diagonalizatio...