Gordon Baym | |
---|---|
Born | New York City, U.S. | July 1, 1935
Alma mater | Cornell University Harvard University |
Known for | Baym-Kadanoff functional |
Awards | Hans A. Bethe Prize (2002) Lars Onsager Prize (2008) Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal (2011) APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research (2021) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Physics |
Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Doctoral advisor | Julian Schwinger |
Doctoral students | Ruben Gerardo Barrera |
Gordon Alan Baym (born July 1, 1935) is an American theoretical physicist.
Born in New York City, he graduated from the Brooklyn Technical High School, and received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1956. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1960, studying under Julian Schwinger.
He joined the physics faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963, becoming a full professor in 1968. His areas of research include condensed-matter physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics, as well as the history of physics.
In 1962 he and Leo Kadanoff collaborated on Quantum Statistical Mechanics: Green's Function Methods in Equilibrium and Nonequilibrium Problems. In 1969 he published Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, a widely used graduate textbook that, unconventionally, begins with photon polarization. In 1991 he and Chris Pethick published the monograph Landau Fermi-Liquid Theory: Concepts and Applications.
Baym was awarded the Hans A. Bethe Prize in 2002 "For his superb synthesis of fundamental concepts which have provided an understanding of matter at extreme conditions, ranging from crusts and interiors of neutron stars to matter at ultrahigh temperature". [1] He also received the Lars Onsager Prize in 2008 "for fundamental applications of statistical physics to quantum fluids, including Fermi liquid theory and ground-state properties of dilute quantum gases, and for bringing a conceptual unity to these areas" [2] along with Christopher Pethick and Tin-Lun Ho.
He has four children, professors of communications Nancy Baym and Geoffrey Baym, mathematician and biologist Michael Baym, and cognitive neuroscientist Carol Baym. He was married from 1958 to 1970 to Nina Baym, a professor of English at the UIUC, [3] and from 1981 to 1992 to Lillian Hoddeson, a professor of history at UIUC. [4] [ citation needed ]
John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N. Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American theoretical physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics, and solid-state physics, and who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.
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Leo Philip Kadanoff was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a former president of the American Physical Society (APS). He contributed to the fields of statistical physics, chaos theory, and theoretical condensed matter physics.
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John Charles Wheatley was an American experimental physicist who worked on quantum fluids at low and very low temperatures.
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The William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute is a research institute in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering. FTPI was largely the work of physics Professor Emeritus, Stephen Gasiorowicz and university alumnus and Twin Cities real-estate developer William I. Fine. The institute officially came into existence in January 1987. FTPI faculty consists of six permanent members: Andrey V. Chubukov, Alex Kamenev, Keith Olive, Maxim Pospelov, Mikhail Shifman, and Boris Shklovskii. The institute has on Oversight Committee consisting of ten members. The Oversight Committee is the board of directors that make decisions concerning the staffing and budgeting of the institute.
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Lillian Hartman Hoddeson is an American historian of science, specializing in the history of physics and technology during the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Eduardo Hector Fradkin is an Argentinian theoretical physicist known for working in various areas of condensed matter physics, primarily using quantum field theoretical approaches. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he is the director of the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory, and is the author of the books Quantum Field Theory: An Integrated Approach and Field Theories of Condensed Matter Physics.
Shivaji Lal Sondhi is an Indian-born theoretical physicist who is currently the Wykeham Professor of Physics in the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford, known for contributions to the field of quantum condensed matter. He is son of former Lok Sabha MP Manohar Lal Sondhi.
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Balajapalli Sriram Shastry is an Indian-American condensed matter physicist, specializing in strongly-correlated Fermi systems, quantum integrable systems, and statistical mechanics.