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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Leo Kadanoff
Leo P. Kadanoff
Born(1937-01-14)January 14, 1937
DiedOctober 26, 2015(2015-10-26) (aged 78)
NationalityAmerican
EducationHarvard University (BS, PhD)
Known forRenormalization group theory of phase transitions
Application of operator algebras in statistical mechanics
Universality
Baym–Kadanoff functional
AwardsWolf Prize in Physics (1980)
Elliott Cresson Medal (1986)
Lars Onsager Prize (1998)
Lorentz Medal (2006)
Isaac Newton Medal (2011)[1]
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics
InstitutionsUniversity of Chicago
Doctoral advisorPaul Martin
Doctoral students

Leo Philip Kadanoff (January 14, 1937 – October 26, 2015) was an American physicist.[2] He was a professor of physics (emeritus from 2004)[3] at the University of Chicago and a former president of the American Physical Society (APS).[4] He contributed to the fields of statistical physics, chaos theory, and theoretical condensed matter physics.

YouTube Encyclopedic

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Transcription

I've often been asked whether if I had to do it all over again, would I be a physicist? Of course I would be a physicist, it uses my skills at mathematics, it makes contact with the world, it helps me feel that I understand how the world works. When I was about 8 years old. I used to read everything that came through the house, including comic books. One image from a science comic book particularly stuck with me over the years. This was an image of an atom. At the centre there was a proton and around the proton an electron, round and around. There is the electron. This electron, however, was peculiar different from other electrons because it had on it little people. And these little people had their own lives, their own things that they did. My latest scientific work was based upon an image entirely similar to this in which what happened on one scale of length was reproduced on a smaller scale and on another scale yet. This formed the basis for my science. As I look back at my life in science, I can see that it divides naturally into three periods. There was a period of acquiring skills and techniques. Followed by a brief period of transcendental creativity. Followed by 45 years of work to maintain worthwhile creativity in the face of a changing biology within me. Here he is - trying to be charming, not me! When I think back at the period at which I was being educated, I see no tremendous evidence of creativity. I think of my parents, who fought themselves to get away from poverty. And insisted, that I too work hard and try to accomplish things especially the things that they couldn't accomplish in life. After being at Harvard, after three years of post doc, after two years of being a professor - I finally learned enough to do the rudiments of my profession myself. My own problem, my own thing - went off to Cambridge in England. Is there a photo from the time when I was fullest of achievement, this is probably the closest. This looks like me from roughly then. I have a beard... It is a 'face' transition. I grew a beard to try to look distinguished. I studied a problem which come up. How do phase transitions occur? A phase transition is like a change from gas to liquid. It is a change in the behaviour of matter, in which the matter all acts cooperatively to go from one situation to another. I was interested in phase transitions particularly because they represented a situation in which what happens on a small scale produces effects at a very large scale. And the relationship between the little and the big is essential to understanding the world around us. After I had done a long and hard calculation in which I worked out in vast detail what was going on inside a phase transition. I put that aside for a little bit and I started to think about other things. Then all of a sudden a vision, a flash came to me - I don't know where it came from in which that the hard work that I had put in all came together and I saw how phase transitions worked. How the little and the big related to one another. I was thrilled, I told other people about it and they seemed thrilled. And of course that made me even more thrilled. It was a wonderful, wonderful, inexplicable time. I was thirty years old; I had accomplished something which was brilliant, inexplicably brilliant. And then I had to face a problem faced by many, many theoretical physicists. What do you do after the act of brilliance? Theoretical physicists become less creative after they are 30 years old. One can give up and do something else entirely but I love physics and I didn't want to do that. So instead I formed the goal of using my physics in a large variety of different kinds endeavours. I started out by working for three or four years on the construction of computer models which described how cities developed, which would help one make choices between different public policies one might apply to cities. After that brief period. I started to work on dynamical systems. That is the behaviour of things in time, particularly how they can go in an orderly fashion or perhaps become altogether chaotic. The next section of my life I started working on fluids because they did this change from orderly into chaotic behaviour and change in a tiny region of the fluid could build itself up and make for a change through the whole thing. I worked with experimentalists, people who were actually working with fluids. [Kadanoff to the researcher] Now, there's the drop coming down there - oh my gosh. Does it just do it again and again? So, in these decades instead of being a sole actor, inventing the whole world myself - I worked with other people and helped them reach out, to invent themselves. And I felt useful by being helpful to my colleagues and to the world of physics at large. [Kadanoff to the researcher] That's wonderful, that's wonderful - look at the wiggles Now that I am almost 75 and I am looking back at my career in physics. I have to ask myself, did something bad happen to me when I was 30 years old? This change from being wonderfully creative to being a helper. Is that a bad thing? It didn't seem like a bad thing to me at any time. I have always been enthusiastic about what I've been doing. Loving the big or the little pieces of creation that I did. I think it can be traced back to my parents. My parents made me have joy in hard work. Joy in the accomplishment that comes from hard work. And the last 45 years have given me that joy, different from transcendental creativity of the time when I was 30 years old but no less pleasurable.

Biography

Kadanoff was raised in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree and doctorate[5] in physics (1960) from Harvard University. After a post-doctorate at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, he joined the physics faculty at the University of Illinois in 1965.

Kadanoff's early research focused upon superconductivity. In the late 1960s, he studied the organization of matter in phase transitions. Kadanoff demonstrated that sudden changes in material properties (such as the magnetization of a magnet or the boiling of a fluid) could be understood in terms of scaling and universality. With his collaborators, he showed how all the experimental data then available for the changes, called second-order phase transitions, could be understood in terms of these two ideas. These same ideas have now been extended to apply to a broad range of scientific and engineering problems, and have found numerous and important applications in urban planning, computer science, hydrodynamics, biology, applied mathematics and geophysics. In recognition of these achievements, he won the Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (1977), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1980), the 1989 Boltzmann Medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and the 2006 Lorentz Medal.

In 1969 he moved to Brown University. He exploited mathematical analogies between solid state physics and urban growth to shed insights into the latter field, so much so that he contributed substantially to the statewide planning program in Rhode Island. In 1978 he moved to the University of Chicago, where he became the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor of Physics and Mathematics. Much of his work in the second half of his career involved contributions to chaos theory, in both mechanical and fluid systems. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982.[6]

He was one of the recipients of the 1999 National Medal of Science, awarded by President Clinton. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences[7] and of the American Philosophical Society[8] as well as being a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. During the last decade, he has received the Quantrell Award (for excellence in teaching) from the University of Chicago, the Centennial Medal of Harvard University, the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society, and the Grande Medaille d'Or of the Académie des sciences de l'Institut de France.

His textbook with Gordon Baym, Quantum Statistical Mechanics (ISBN 020141046X), is a prominent text in the field and has been widely translated.

With Leo Irakliotis, Kadanoff established the Center for Presentation of Science at the University of Chicago.

In June 2013, it was stated that anonymous donors had provided a $3.5 million gift to establish the Leo Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Chicago.[9] He died after complications from an illness on October 26, 2015.[10] In 2018 the American Physical Society established the Leo P. Kadanoff Prize in his honor.

Publications (selection)

References

  1. ^ "Honors by Faculty". uchicago.edu. Archived from the original on 2011-06-13.
  2. ^ Brenner, Michael P.; Nagel, Sidney R. (April 2016). "Obituary. Leo Philip Kadanoff". Physics Today. 69 (4): 69–70. Bibcode:2016PhT....69d..69B. doi:10.1063/pt.3.3146.
  3. ^ "Faculty Directory". uchicago.edu. Archived from the original on 2011-06-13.
  4. ^ "History of the APS Presidential Line". Retrieved 23 June 2011.
  5. ^ "Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics". uchicago.edu. Archived from the original on 2011-06-18.
  6. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter K" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved June 21, 2011.
  7. ^ "Leo P. Kadanoff". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2021-12-09.
  8. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-12-09.
  9. ^ "Anonymous gift of $3.5 million to support Leo Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics". June 11, 2013.
  10. ^ "Leo Kadanoff Obituary - Skokie, IL - ChicagoTribune.com". ChicagoTribune.com.

External links

This page was last edited on 31 January 2024, at 05:50
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