APS Member History

Results: 7 Items	Modify Search \| New Search
Page: 1	Reset Page

1	Name:	Dr. Michael E. Fisher
	Institution:	University of Maryland; Cornell University
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1931
	Death Date:	November 26, 2021

	Michael E. Fisher has been called the unquestioned father of the modern theory of the behavior of matter at thermodynamic phase transitions and critical points. Beginning with early work on understanding the non-analytic mean description of matter near a critical point (the existence of generalized power-law changes of physical properties in the neighborhood of a critical point), he went on to participate in the great 1965-72 period during which this deep, long-standing problem was effectively solved. Persisting in broadening and deepening the breatkthrough mode in this period, Dr. Fisher's group exploited the renormalization group scheme, which came to penetrate science in fields as far apart as polymers and cosmology. Since 1987 Dr. Fisher has been a professor at the University of Maryland's Institute for Physical Science and Technology. Born in Trinidad in 1931, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of London, and he has also taught at the Royal Air Force Technical College, King's College, the University of London and, from 1966 to 1987, at Cornell University. Winner of the American Physical Society's Irving Langmuir Prize (1971), the Wolf Prize (1980) and the Boltzmann Medal (1983) among other honors, Dr. Fisher is a fellow of the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Indian Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Brasilian Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

2	Name:	Dr. Murray Gell-Mann
	Institution:	Santa Fe Institute & California Institute of Technology
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1929
	Death Date:	May 24, 2019

	Murray Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1969 for his work on the theory of elementary particles. Professor Gell-Mann's "eightfold way" theory brought order to the chaos created by the discovery of some 100 particles in the atom's nucleus, then he found that all of those particles, including the neutron and proton, are composed of fundamental building blocks that he named "quarks." The quarks are permanently confined by forces coming from the exchange of "gluons." He and others later constructed the quantum field theory of quarks and gluons, called "quantum chromodynamics," which seems to account for all the nuclear particles and their strong interactions. Besides being a Nobel laureate, Professor Gell-Mann received the Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Research Corporation Award, and the John J. Carty medal of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Gell-Mann was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal in 2005. In 1988 he was listed on the United Nations Environmental Program Roll of Honor for Environmental Achievement (the Global 500). Professor Gell-Mann was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1955 until 1993. He was a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation from 1979-2002. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Gell-Mann served on the board of the Wildlife Conservation Society, was a Citizen Regent of the Smithsonian (1974-88), served on the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (1994-2001), and was a member of the Board of Directors of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Although he was a theoretical physicist, Professor Gell-Mann's interests extended to many other subjects, including natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, history, depth psychology, and creative thinking, all subjects connected with biological evolution, cultural evolution, and learning and thinking. He felt deep concern about policy matters related to world environmental quality (including conservation of biological diversity), restraint in population growth, sustainable economic development, and stability of the world political system. His later research at the Santa Fe Institute focused on the subject of complex adaptive systems, which brings all these areas of study together. He was also interested in how knowledge and understanding are to be extracted from the welter of "information" that can now be transmitted and stored as a result of the digital revolution. He was author of the popular science book The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. Murray Gell-Mann died May 24, 2019 in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the age of 89.

3	Name:	Lord Martin Rees
	Institution:	University of Cambridge
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	101. Astronomy
	Residency:	International
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1942

	Martin Rees is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal and also Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University. After studying at the University of Cambridge, he held post-doctoral positions in the UK and the USA, before becoming a professor at Sussex University. In 1973, he became a fellow of King's College and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge (continuing in the latter post until 1991) and served for ten years as director of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. From 1992 to 2003 he was a Royal Society Research Professor. He is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy, and several other foreign academies. His awards include the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Balzan International Prize, the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the Heineman Prize for Astrophysics (AAS/AIP), the Bower Award for Science of the Franklin Institute, the Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation, the Einstein Award of the World Cultural Council, the Crafoord Prize (Royal Swedish Academy), the Lewis Thomas Prize (2009) from Rockefeller University in recognition of his book Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (2000), the 2011 Templeton Prize, and the 2012 Isaac Newton medal of the Institute of Physics. He has been president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1994-95) and the Royal Astronomical Society (1992-94) and a trustee of the British Museum, NESTA and the Kennedy Memorial Trust. He is currently on the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of Science and Industry the Institute for Public Policy Research, and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and has served on many bodies connected with education, space research, arms control and international collaboration in science. In 2005 he was appointed to the House of Lords and elected President of the Royal Society. He is the author or co-author of more than 500 research papers, mainly on astrophysics and cosmology, and of numerous magazine and newspaper articles on scientific and general subjects. He is the author of several books, including From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons (2011) and On the Future (2018). He has broadcast and lectured widely and held various visiting professorships, etc. His main current research interests are high energy astrophysics, cosmic structure formation and general cosmological issues.

4	Name:	Dr. Edward C. Stone
	Institution:	Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory; California Institute of Technology; Jet Propulsion Laboratory
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	101. Astronomy
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1936

	Edward C. Stone is the David Morrisroe Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and director emeritus of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has also served as chair of Caltech's Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy and oversaw the development of the Keck Observatory as Vice President for Astronomical Facilities and chairman of the California Association for Research in Astronomy. He is also a director of the W. M. Keck Foundation. Since 1972, Dr. Stone has been the project scientist for the Voyager Mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, coordinating the scientific study of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and Voyager's continuing exploration of the outer heliosphere and search for the edge of interstellar space. Following his first instrument on a Discoverer satellite in 1961, Dr. Stone has been a principal investigator on eight NASA spacecraft and a co-investigator on five others, all carrying instruments for studying galactic cosmic rays, solar energetic particles, and planetary magnetospheres. Dr. Stone is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, president of the International Academy of Astronautics, and a vice president of COSPAR. Among his awards and honors, Dr. Stone received the National Medal of Science from President George H.W. Bush (1991), the Magellanic Premium from the American Philosophical Society, and Distinguished Service Medals from NASA. In 1996, asteroid (5841) was named after him. In 2015 he was awarded the Alumni Medal from the University of Chicago.

5	Name:	Sir John Meurig Thomas
	Institution:	The Royal Institution of Great Britain & University of Cambridge
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
	Residency:	International
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1932
	Death Date:	November 13, 2020

	Professor Sir John Meurig Thomas was born in December 1932 in South Wales. The son of a coalminer, Sir John's interest in science was greatly aroused as a teenager when his physics mistress talked about the life and work of Michael Faraday, who has remained one of his scientific heroes. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree from the University of Wales, Swansea, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of London. His first academic appointment (1958) was at the University of Wales, Bangor, where inter alia he demonstrated the profound influence that dislocations and other structural imperfections exert upon the chemical, electronic and surface properties of solids. He became Professor and Head of Chemistry at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1969, where he broadened his interests in solid-state, surface and materials chemistry and pioneered the application of electron microscopy in chemistry. In 1978 he became Head of the Department of Physical Chemistry, University of Cambridge, where his development of new techniques in solid-state and materials science and his design and synthesis of new catalysts progressed greatly. From 1986-91 he was Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, where he occupied the chair that was created for Michael Faraday. He was also Director of the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory. At Cambridge he extended his earlier electron microscopic and surface studies of mineral and intercalates to encompass the synthesis and structural determination of zeolitic materials by a combination of solid-state NMR, neutron scattering and real-space imaging. At London he added synchrotron radiaton to his armoury and devised techniques which combine X-ray spectroscopy and high-resolution X-ray diffraction to determine the atomic structure of active sites of solid catalysts under operating conditions. He has also designed new microporous and mesoporous catalysts, onto the inner surfaces of which active centres (for isomerizations, epoxidation, chiral hygrogenations and chiral amination) were grafted from organo-metallic precursors. He has also devised molecular sieve catalysts that convert n-alkanes to n-alkanol, cyclohexane or cyclohexene to adipic acid, n-hexane to adipic acid and cyclohexanone to its oxime and caprolactam, all in air under solvent-free conditions. One of his inventions, the single-step, solvent-free catalytic synthesis of ethyl acetate, is the basis of a 220,000 ton p.a. plant in the U.K., the largest of its kind in the world. One of his most significant recent catalytic innovations is the boosting of the enamtioselectivity of asymmetric organometallic catalysts by constraining them within mesoporous supports. This has been multiply patented (2003) by German industry as a means of producing enantiomerically enriched hydroxycarboxylic esters. He is the author of over 950 research papers and twenty patents, of two definitive university texts on heterogeneous catalysis (1967 and 1997), and of Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution: The Genius of Man and Place (1991; Japanese translation, 1994; Italian translation, 2006), and co-editor of many other monographs. His awards include the Davy Medal and the Bakerian and Rutherford Lectureships of the Royal Society, the Faraday Medal, Longstaff Medal and four others of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Messel Gold Medal of the Society of Chemical Industry, the Semenov Centenary Medal and the Kapitza Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Science, the Willard Gibbs Gold Medal of the American Chemical Society, the Royal Medal (Queen's Medal), and the first recipient of the Award for Creative Research in Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Catalysis, also of the American Chemical Society. In 1995 the European Federation of Catalyst Societies (EFCATS), representing 24 national societies, chose him to give the first series of François Gault Lectures at 12 centers in 6 European countries. An FRS since 1977, in 1999 he was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering for work that "has profoundly added to the science-base of heterogeneous catalysis leading to the commercial exploitation of zeolites through engineering processes". He was a Foreign Member or Hon. Foreign Fellow of fifteen other national and international academies and holds numerous honorary doctorates from Australian, British, Canadian, Chinese, Dutch, Egyptian, French, Italian, Spanish and U.S. universities. In 2000 The Electron Microscopy and Microanalysis Society of America held a symposium in his honour at their annual convention in Philadelphia, In September 2002 an International Symposium of Catalysis was held in London by the Royal Society of Chemistry to celebrate his 70th birthday. Stanford University awarded him the Linus Pauling gold medal in 2003 for his contributions to the advancement of science, and the Italian Chemical Society presented him with its Guilio Natta Gold Medal for meritorious work in catalysis. In 2007 the International Precious Metal Institute awarded him its Distinguished Achievement Award for "pioneering contributions to the field of heterogeneous catalysis using precious metals over a long, distinguished career." In 2010, he was awarded three lectureships: the Bragg Prize lecturship of the British Crystallographic Association, the Sven Beggren Prize lectureship of the Royal Lund Physiographic Academy, and the Ertl Prize lectureship of the Max Planck Gessellschaft. One of the world's most highly cited chemists, Sir John was founding co-editor-in-chief of Catalysis Letters (1987), Topics in Catalysis (1992), and Current Opinion in Solid-State and Materials Science (1996). He has done much to popularize science amoung young people and adult lay audiences, giving numerous lecture-demonstrations, radio, television, and national Portrait Gallery talks: his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on crystals were broadcast on BBC national TV in 1987. He served (1982-85) as a science advisor in the U.K. Government Cabinet Office Committee, as Chairman of CHEMRAWN (chemical research applied to world needs), and Trustee of the Science Museum and of the Natural History Museum, London. In 1991 he was knighted for his services to chemistry and the popularization of science. In recognition of his contributions to geochemistry, a new mineral, meurigite, was name after him in 1995. John Meurig Thomas was Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, and Honorary Professor at the Department of Materials Science, University of Cambridge. From 1993-2002 he was Master of Peterhouse, the oldest college in the University of Cambridge. He is Vice President of the Cambridge University Musical Society. Sir John died on November 13, 2020, at age 87.

6	Name:	Dr. Benjamin Widom
	Institution:	Cornell University
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1927

	Chemist Benjamin Widom is known for his theoretical contributions to the thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of liquids (including complex liquids such as microemulsions and polymer solutions), of phase transitions and critical phenomena, and of interfaces. Currently Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Cornell University, he received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1953, after which time he joined the university faculty as an instructor in chemistry. He became a full professor in 1963 and chaired the chemistry department from 1978-81. Dr. Widom was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1974 and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1979. In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Boltzmann Medal "for his illuminating studies of the statistical mechanics of fluids and fluid mixtures and their interfacial properties, especially his clear and general formulation of scaling hypotheses for the equation of state and surface tensions of fluids near critical points."

7	Name:	Dr. Edward Witten
	Institution:	Institute for Advanced Study
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1951

	Edward Witten received a Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1976. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in 1977 and a Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, from 1977-80. He was professor of physics at Princeton University from 1980-87 before joining the Institute for Advanced Study as a professor in the School of Natural Sciences in 1987. He also served for two years as a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. Edward Witten's recent research is at the interface of elementary particle physics and geometry. He has revolutionized the study of three and four dimensional spaces, using insights from quantum mechanics. Invariants of knots in three space, obtained from quantum field theory, is a noteworthy example. He made important contributions to the quantization of gauge theories and is a world leader in developing string theory. Understanding the geometric concepts in terms of which string theory should be formulated is his main goal. Dr. Witten is a brilliant lecturer and an inspiration to a new generation of mathematical physicists. He was a MacArthur Fellowship recipient in 1982 and has also been honored with the Einstein Medal of the Einstein Society of Bern, Switzerland (1985); the Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics (1986); the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (1986); the Fields Medal of the International Union of Mathematicians (1990); the Klein Medal from Stockholm University (1998); the Dannie Heineman Prize from the American Institute of Physics (1998); the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics from Northwestern University (2000); the Clay Research Award (2001); The Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics (2010); the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2010); the Solomon Lefschetz Medal by the Mathematical Society of Mexico (2011), the inaugural Fundamental Physics Prize established by Yuri Milner (2012), the Kyoto Prize (2014), and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2016). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1993.