Class
| • | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. A. Paul Alivisatos | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Dr. A. Paul Alivisatos is President of the University of Chicago where he also serves as Chair of the Board of Governors of Argonne National Laboratory and Chair of the Board of Directors of Fermi Research Alliance LLC, the operator of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is also the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and the College.
Previously he was Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost and Samsung Distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the University of California, Berkeley. He also direced the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute (ENSI), and held professorships in UC Berkeley’s departments of materials science and chemistry. In addition, he is a founder of two prominent nanotechnology companies, Nanosys and Quantum Dot Corp, now a part of Life Tech. He also served as Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) until accepting the Vice Chancellor position in 2016. Dr. Alivisatos received a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry in 1981 from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1986. He began his career with UC Berkeley in 1988 and with Berkeley Lab in 1991.
Groundbreaking contributions to the fundamental physical chemistry of nanocrystals are the hallmarks of Dr. Alivisatos’s distinguished career. His research breakthroughs include the synthesis of size- and shape-controlled nanoscrystals, and forefront studies of nanocrystal properties, including optical, electrical, structural and thermodynamic. In his research, he has demonstrated key applications of nanocrystals in biological imaging and renewable energy. He played a critical role in the establishment of the Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy’s Nanoscale Science Research Center; and was the facility’s founding director. He is the founding editor of Nano Letters, a leading scientific publication in nanoscience.
Dr. Alivisatos has been recognized for his accomplishments, with awards such as the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Linus Pauling Medal, the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the Eni Italgas Prize for Energy and Environment, the Rank Prize for Optoelectronics, the Wilson Prize, the Coblentz Award for Advances in Molecular Spectroscopy, the American Chemical Society Award for Colloid and Surface Science, the Von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society, the 2014 ACS Materials Chemistry Award, and most recently, the National Medal of Science. In January 2017 he was awarded the National Academy of Sciences' Award in Chemical Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2015. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Wallace S. Broecker | | | Institution: | Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | Death Date: | February 18, 2019 | | | | | | |
For more than half a century Wally Broecker devoted his life to study of the role of the oceans in climate change. By using isotopic analysis to study physical mixing and chemical cycling in the ocean, he developed a picture of the ocean’s thermohaline circulations as comprising a conveyor belt. He showed this global conveyor belt to be susceptible to sudden shifts from one mode to another, and in the process able to trigger changes in climate that are not slow to develop but instead abrupt. This conceptual framework, which he outlined in more than 450 papers and ten books, provides an essential starting point for our present-day understanding of climate, dating back to the Pleistocene and extending forward to its long-term future outlook. Broecker was a recipient of the National Medal of Science (1996) and numerous other honors. Wallace Broecker died February 18, 2019 in Manhattan at the age of 87. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. N. David Mermin | | | Institution: | Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1935 | | | | | | |
N. David Mermin received an A.B. degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1956. He stayed at Harvard, changing to physics, where he received a Ph.D. in 1961. He spent two postdoctoral years in Rudolf Peierls’ Department of Mathematical Physics in Birmingham England, followed by a year with Walter Kohn at the University of California, San Diego, before he joined Physics Department at Cornell University in 1964. Mermin was Director of Cornell’s Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics from 1984 to 1990, and retired from Cornell as the Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus, in 2006.
He is known for the Mermin-Wagner theorem in statistical mechanics, the Mermin-Ho relation in low-temperature physics, and the Lindhard-Mermin dielectric function in metals physics. He extended the fundamental theorem of density-functional theory to thermal equilibrium (chemistry), reformulated space-groups to include aperiodic crystals (crystallography), and applied topology to the theory of defects (condensed matter physics). He has written extensively about foundational issues in quantum mechanics.
His 1976 book Solid State Physics (with Neil W. Ashcroft) has been translated into six languages and remains the major text in the field, though still in its original edition. His Quantum Computer Science (2007) offers a unique perspective on this new, growing field. In addition to these two technical books he has written four books for a general audience. Space and Time in Special Relativity (1968) and It’s About Time (2005) give unusual and quite different expositions of special relativity, using no mathematical tools beyond plane geometry and some very elementary algebra. Boojums All the Way Through (1990) and Why Quark Rhymes with Pork (2016) are collections of his popular essays and lectures.
Mermin is well-known for his thirty "Reference Frame" columns commenting on physics and the practice of physics, that appeared in Physics Today between 1988 and 2009. All can be found in his quark-pork volume. His efforts to reconcile the two sides in the "science wars" of the 1990s met with more indignation than approval, from both factions. He has held dozens of named visiting lectureships throughout the United States and Europe.
He was a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1985 to 1989; a member of the Executive Committee of the Cornell Materials Science Center, in the 1980s; a member of the advisory board of arXiv.org in the late 90s and early 00s, and at various times a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of Physics, Physics in Perspective, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
Mermin was a 1970 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a 1988 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a 1991 member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1989 he received the first Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, in 1994, the Klopsteg Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers, in 1997 Cornell’s Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2010 the Majorana "Best Person in Physics" Prize.
In retirement he continues to write and lecture on quantum foundations, works very hard at the piano (struggling to master, for example, the Chopin G Minor Ballade),
and collaborates with his wife Dorothy, the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Emerita, on maintaining their house and the surrounding eight acres of gardens, meadows, and woodlands in the town of Dryden, New York, just outside of Ithaca.
"N." stands for "Nathaniel", which the USA Patriot Act is slowly requiring the world to call him. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Maryam Mirzakhani | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1977 | | | Death Date: | July 15, 2017 | | | | | | |
Maryam Mirzakhani was the first female recipient of the Fields Medal, the leading international prize for mathematical research that must be awarded by the age of 40. To earn this distinction she had made outstanding contributions to understanding the dynamics and geometry of two-dimensional surfaces (known as Riemann surfaces) and their deformation (or moduli) spaces. She extended and integrated insights developed by other mathematical pioneers such as Thurston, Ratner, Margulis, and Bers in a wide variety of fields including algebraic geometry, topology and probability theory. Her work probed the structure of these moduli spaces by studying the behavior of simple geodesics, which are curves on the surface with no self-intersections that minimize the distance between any two points lying sufficiently close to each other on the curve. Mirzakhani and her coworkers produced the long sought-after proof of the conjecture that while the closure of a real geodesic in moduli space can be fractal the closure of a complex geodesic is always well-behaved, indeed an algebraic subvariety.
Born in Iran, Mirzakhani completed a bachelor's degree at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and completed her doctorate at Harvard University. She was a professor at Princeton University before moving to Stanford University in 2008. Dr. Mirzakhani died July 15, 2017, at the age of 40. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Margaret Murnane | | | Institution: | University of Colorado at Boulder | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Margaret Murnane is a Fellow of JILA and a Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of Colorado. She runs a joint, multi-disciplinary, research group with her husband, Prof. Henry Kapteyn. She received her B.S and M.S. degrees from University College Cork, Ireland, and her Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley. Prof. Murnane with her students and collaborators uses coherent beams of laser and x-ray light to capture the fastest dynamics in molecules and materials at the nanoscale. Margaret is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, and the AAAS. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, and chaired the President’s Committee for the National Medal of Science for three years. She was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. She shared the 2009 Ahmed Zewail Award of the American Chemical Society, the 2010 Schawlow Prize of the American Physical Society, and the 2010 R.W. Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America with her husband Henry Kapteyn. She received the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin Institute. Margaret is very interested in increasing diversity in science and engineering. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Tim Palmer | | | Institution: | Jesus College, University of Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Tim Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics at the University of Oxford. Tim’s doctoral research was in general relativity where he formulated the first quasi-local expressions for gravitational energy momentum in generic space times. After his PhD, he moved into weather and climate research. Amongst his research achievements, he discovered the world’s largest breaking waves (in the stratosphere) and established the role of Atlantic ocean variability as a causal factor for long-term drought in the African Sahel.
Tim worked at the UK Met Office and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather forecasts where he pioneered studies to quantify the predictability of the climate system, leading the group which developed operational ensemble-based probabilistic weather and climate prediction in the medium, monthly and seasonal timescales. On returning to Oxford in 2010, Tim’s research interests have included the development of stochastic parametrisation in weather and climate models, and the application of ideas in inexact computing for high-resolution weather and climate prediction. He continued his work on fundamental physics developing deterministic methods based on topological models of the p-adic integers, to reformulate quantum theory as a realistic locally causal theory. Tim contributed to all five IPCC Working Group One assessment reports and led two European Union Climate Projects. He has won the top prizes of the American Meteorological Society and the European Meteorological Society, and won the Dirac Gold Medal of the Institute of Physics, for his work on probabilistic weather and climate prediction. He does a considerable amount of outreach work both on climate change, and on chaos theory. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2003 and was President of the Royal Meteorological Society from 2010-2012. In 2015 he became Commander of the British Empire as part of the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List. In 2019 was elected an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2020 was elected an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Tim Palmer was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2015. | |
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