James Edward Young

Last updated

James Edward Young
Born (1926-01-18) January 18, 1926 (age 99)
Wheeling, West Virginia
Alma mater Howard University (B.A.)
MIT (Ph.D.)
SpouseE. Elaine Hunter
Children1
Scientific career
Institutions Hampton Institute
MIT
Thesis Propagation of sound in attenuating ducts containing absorptive strips  (1953)
Doctoral advisor Philip M. Morse
Doctoral students Shirley Ann Jackson
Sylvester James Gates

James Edward Young (born January 18, 1926) is an American physicist who was the first black tenured faculty member in the Department of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a founding member of the National Society of Black Physicists and a mentor for Shirley Ann Jackson.

Contents

Early life and education

Young was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. [1] He attended Lincoln High School, a segregated school for African-American children of Ohio County, West Virginia and Marshall County, West Virginia, [2] and graduated in 1941. [1]

Young studied physics at Howard University, and earned his bachelor's degree in 1946. [3] From 1946 to 1949, he was a physics instructor at the Hampton Institute, while working on a master's degree in physics at Howard. [3]

In 1949, he joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research assistant. [3] In 1953, he earned a Ph.D. in physics, and his MIT dissertation was titled, “Propagation of Sound In Attenuating Ducts Containing Absorptive Strips.” [3] He completed a one-year Post-doctoral Fellow in Acoustics at MIT in 1954. [3]

Young's early research considered the propagation of noise in pipes. [4] He was a member of Sigma Pi Sigma, Sigma Xi and Beta Kappa Chi. [5] After earning his PhD, Young joined Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he began working on particle physics. He investigated pions [6] and deuteron stripping theory. [7]

Research and career

Young researched and taught theoretical particle physics, critical phenomena and nuclear physics in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. [8] [9] He earned tenure in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, and was the first black member of faculty to do so. [10] He was interested in the intermediate structures in nuclear reactions. [11] He contributed to several textbooks, including Nuclear, Particle and Many Body Physics [12] and the Intermediate Structure in Nuclear Reactions. [11] Young was the doctoral advisor for Shirley Ann Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a PhD at MIT, as well as Sylvester James Gates. [13] [14]

In 1977 Young was a founding member of the National Society of Black Physicists. [1] [15] [16] He founded the society with Ronald E. Mickens, with whom he had previously discussed senior Black physicists who became role models for their students. They hosted a meeting at Fisk University to celebrate these "elders", including Halson V. Eagleson, Donald Edwards and John McNeile Hunter. The National Society of Black Physicists emerged from these meetings, an independent society led by African-Americans who "created and developed activities and programs for themselves". [16]

In 2025, Young is recognized as Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at MIT. [3]

Personal life

Young married E. Elaine Hunter, with whom he has one child, James E. Young III. [5]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "James Young". www.nsbp.org. Retrieved September 18, 2019.
  2. ↑ Lincoln School. Ohio Public Library.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 James Edward Young. Professor of Physics, Emeritus. MIT Department of Physics.
  4. ↑ Young, J. E.; Mawardi, O. K. (September 1, 1954). "On the Propagation of Noise in Pipes. II". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 26 (5): 938. Bibcode:1954ASAJ...26..938Y. doi: 10.1121/1.1927969 . ISSN   0001-4966.
  5. 1 2 History, Mit Black (October 24, 2015). "Capture the MO*MIT: MIT Physicist - James Edward Young". Capture the MO*MIT. Retrieved September 18, 2019.
  6. ↑ Das, T.; Guralnik, G. S.; Mathur, V. S.; Low, F. E.; Young, J. E. (May 1, 1967). "Electromagnetic Mass Difference of Pions". Physical Review Letters. 18 (18): 759–761. Bibcode:1967PhRvL..18..759D. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.18.759.
  7. ↑ Young, James E. (February 1, 1961). "The optical model and deuteron stripping". Nuclear Physics. 23: 40–52. Bibcode:1961NucPh..23...40Y. doi:10.1016/0029-5582(61)90237-1. ISSN   0029-5582.
  8. ↑ Chang, T. S.; Nicoll, J. F.; Young, J. E. (August 21, 1978). "A closed-form differential renormalization-group generator for critical dynamics". Physics Letters A. 67 (4): 287–290. Bibcode:1978PhLA...67..287C. doi:10.1016/0375-9601(78)90306-7. ISSN   0375-9601.
  9. ↑ "James E. Young, 1983". MIT Black History. Retrieved December 30, 2019.[ permanent dead link ]
  10. ↑ "James E. Young, 1983". MIT Black History. Retrieved September 18, 2019.[ permanent dead link ]
  11. 1 2 Kennedy, Hugh P.; Schrils, Rudolph (January 13, 2015). Intermediate Structure in Nuclear Reactions. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN   9780813163314.
  12. ↑ Jones, C. EDWARD; Low, F. E.; Young, J. E. (January 1, 1972), Morse, PHILIP M.; Feld, BERNARD T.; Feshbach, HERMAN; Wilson, RICHARD (eds.), "Generalized O(2,1) Expansion for Asymptotically Growing Amplitudes**This work is supported in part by the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission under Contract AT(30-1)-2098.", Nuclear, Particle and Many Body Physics, Academic Press, pp. 476–496, ISBN   9780125082013 , retrieved September 18, 2019
  13. ↑ "Shirley Jackson". www.nsbp.org. Retrieved September 18, 2019.
  14. ↑ Jordan, Diann (2006). Sisters in Science: Conversations with Black Women Scientists about Race, Gender, and Their Passion for Science. Purdue University Press. ISBN   9781557534453.
  15. ↑ "MIT Department of Physics". web.mit.edu. Retrieved September 18, 2019.
  16. 1 2 E, Mickens Ronald (February 4, 2002). Edward Bouchet: The First African-american Doctorate. World Scientific. ISBN   9789814488884.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.