Tony Rothman | |
---|---|
Born | 29 April 1953 71) [1] Philadelphia | (age
Occupation | |
Genre | Science fiction (hard SF), popular science |
Website | |
www |
Tony Rothman (born 1953) is an American theoretical physicist, academic and writer. [2]
Tony is the son of physicist and science fiction writer Milton A. Rothman and psychotherapist Doris W. Rothman. He holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College, (1975) and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin (1981), where he studied at the Center for Relativity under the supervision of its long-time director Richard Matzner. He continued on post-doctoral fellowships at Oxford under Dennis Sciama, Moscow State University under Yakov Zeldovich and the University of Cape Town under George F.R. Ellis.
Rothman worked briefly as an editor at Scientific American , then taught at Harvard, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bryn Mawr College and from 2005 to 2013 at Princeton University. In January 2016 he joined the faculty of NYU Polytech, now known as the Tandon School of Engineering, and retired from teaching there in 2019.
Rothman's scientific research has been concerned mainly with general relativity and cosmology, for which he has made contributions to the study of the early universe, specifically in the areas of cosmic nucleosynthesis, black holes, inflationary cosmology and gravitons.
Rothman was the scientific editor for Andrei Sakharov's Memoirs and he has contributed to numerous magazines, including Scientific American, Discover, American Scientist , The New Republic and History Today. He has played oboe at a professional level and commissioned a concerto from Alexander Raskatov.
Tony Rothman's first book, [3] written just after graduating college, was The World is Round (Ballantine, 1978), a science fiction novel about the evolution of society on a non-earthlike planet. His experiences in Russia resulted in publication of a collection of short stories entitled Censored Tales (1989). He has also published six books of popular science and science history. His collection A Physicist on Madison Avenue (1991) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, while Doubt and Certainty, with George Sudarshan, was chosen by the A-List as one of the 200 best books of 1998. He co-authored Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry with Fukagawa Hidetoshi. [4] Published in 2008, this was the first history of sangaku in English, and won the Association of American Publisher's 2008 PROSE award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in mathematics. His play The Magician and the Fool, about Pushkin and Galois, won the 1981 Oxford Experimental Theatre Club competition, and his play The Sand Reckoner, about Archimedes, received a staged reading at Harvard in 1995. He has also written five other plays, on mathematical and musical subjects.
Rothman's published writings encompass hundreds of works in 7 languages and include 3,073 library holdings. [5]
Physics is the scientific study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.
The Large Scale Structure of Space–Time is a 1973 treatise on the theoretical physics of spacetime by the physicist Stephen Hawking and the mathematician George Ellis. It is intended for specialists in general relativity rather than newcomers.
Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The Journal of Mathematical Physics defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of mathematical methods suitable for such applications and for the formulation of physical theories". An alternative definition would also include those mathematics that are inspired by physics, known as physical mathematics.
Howard Percy "Bob" Robertson was an American mathematician and physicist known for contributions related to physical cosmology and the uncertainty principle. He was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University.
George Francis Rayner Ellis, FRS, Hon. FRSSAf, is the emeritus distinguished professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, published in 1973, and is considered one of the world's leading theorists in cosmology. From 1989 to 1992 he served as president of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. He is a past president of the International Society for Science and Religion. He is an A-rated researcher with the NRF.
Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan was an Indian American theoretical physicist and a professor at the University of Texas. Prof.Sudarshan has been credited with numerous contributions to the field of theoretical physics, including Glauber–Sudarshan P representation, V-A theory, tachyons, quantum Zeno effect, open quantum system and quantum master equations, spin–statistics theorem, non-invariance groups, positive maps of density matrices, and quantum computation.
Sangaku or san gaku are Japanese geometrical problems or theorems on wooden tablets which were placed as offerings at Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples during the Edo period by members of all social classes.
Japanese mathematics denotes a distinct kind of mathematics which was developed in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1867). The term wasan, from wa ("Japanese") and san ("calculation"), was coined in the 1870s and employed to distinguish native Japanese mathematical theory from Western mathematics.
Narasimhaiengar Mukunda is an Indian theoretical physicist.
Kambei Mori or Mōri Kambei, also known as Mōri Kambei ShigeyoshiMōri Shigeyoshi, was a Japanese mathematician in the Edo period.
Robert Geroch is an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. He has worked prominently on general relativity and mathematical physics and has promoted the use of category theory in mathematics and physics. He was the Ph.D. supervisor for Abhay Ashtekar, Basilis Xanthopoulos and Gary Horowitz. He also proved an important theorem in spin geometry.
Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experimental tools to probe these phenomena.
Fujita Sadasuke, also known as Honda Teiken, was a Japanese mathematician in the Edo period. He is the author of Seiyō sampō which was published in 1781.
Clive William Kilmister was a British mathematician who specialised in the mathematical foundations of physics, especially quantum mechanics and relativity.
Hans-Jürgen Treder was a German theoretical physicist and in the GDR, specializing in general relativity, astrophysics, and cosmology. He also had an interest in the history of science and philosophy.
Ivor Robinson was a British-American mathematical physicist, born and educated in England, noted for his important contributions to the theory of relativity. He was a principal organizer of the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics.
Muramatsu Shigekiyo was a Japanese mathematician and curator in the Edo period. He is known for being the first to calculate the volume of a sphere using very thin slices, and to use inscribed and circumscribed polygones to approximate the circumference of a circle, and hence π. And by using a 32768-gon, he calculated its perimeter as 3.141592648... He published his value of π to 22 decimal places in his 1663 book Sanso, but only 8 were correct. Later, in 1681, Seki Takakazu used the same method with a 131072-gon, and got π correct to 11 decimal places.
Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry is a book on Sangaku, geometry problems presented on wooden tablets as temple offerings in the Edo period of Japan. It was written by Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman, and published in 2008 by the Princeton University Press. It won the PROSE Award of the Association of American Publishers in 2008 as the best book in mathematics for that year.
Richard Kerner is a French theoretical physicist andProfessor Emeritus of Pierre and Marie Curie University whose research extends into gravitation, cosmology, field theory, solid-state physics, noncommutative geometry, quantum mechanics and mathematical and theoretical biology.
Richard Alfred Matzner is an American physicist, working mostly in the field of general relativity and cosmology, including numerical relativity, kinetic theory, black hole physics, and gravitational radiation. He is Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin where he directed the Center for Relativity. In 1993 he organized and was Lead Principal Investigator of an NSF/ARPA funded computational Grand Challenge program involving ten university teams seeking computational descriptions for the interaction of black holes as potential sources for observable gravitational radiation. His work leading what became known as the Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge Alliance featured in Kip Thorne's Nobel Prize lecture, including when Matzner and Alliance collaborators wagered Thorne that numerical relativity would produce a simulated waveform comparable to observation prior to the first LIGO detection. Matzner and colleagues eventually won, Thorne saying he "conceded the bet with great happiness."