| | 1 | Name: | Professor Sir Michael Victor Berry | | | Institution: | University of Bristol | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Michael Berry is Melville Wills Professor of Physics (Emeritus) at the University of Bristol, UK, where he has been for more than twice as long he has not. He is a physicist, focusing on the physics of the mathematics...of the physics. Applications include the geometry of singularities (caustics on large scales, vortices on fine scales) in optics and other waves, connections between classical and quantum physics, and the physical asymptotics of divergent series. He delights in finding the arcane in the mundane - abstract and subtle concepts in familiar or dramatic phenomena:
*Singularities of smooth gradient maps in rainbows and tsunamis;
*The Laplace operator in oriental magic mirrors;
*Elliptic integrals in the polarization pattern of the clear blue sky;
*Geometry of twists and turns in quantum indistinguishability;
*Matrix degeneracies in overhead-projector transparencies;
*Gauss sums in the light beyond a humble diffraction grating. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Barbara V. Jacak | | | Institution: | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1957 | | | | | | |
Barbara V. Jacak is a Professor of Physics at University of California, Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized leader in the physics community whose research lies on the boundary between nuclear and particle physics. Jacak earned her Phd in chemical physics from Michigan State University in 1984.
Jacak's research career includes 12 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory's Physics Division, where she was a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow from 1984 to 1987 and a scientific staff member from 1987 to 1996. She then spent 18 years as a Professor of Physics at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, becoming Distinguished Professor of Physics in 2008. From 2007 to 2012, she served as spokesperson for the PHENIX Collaboration at the Brookhaven Relativistic Ion Collider, where she played a crucial role in discovering quark-gluon plasma, a new state of matter in which quarks are no longer confined and display a strongly interacting liquid-like behavior. In addition to being named a Professor of Physics at Berkeley in 2015, she was also appointed director of nuclear science at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. A leader of the CERN NA44 heavy-ion experiment, she discovered the momentum dependence of Bose-Einstein correlations of the collision products, allowing her to infer experimentally the collective expansion velocity of the collision volume.
Jacak is also a superb science administrator. She was a member of the American Physical Society's Division of Nuclear Physics Executive Committee from 1995 to 1997. From 2014 to 2018, she was a member of the National Academy of Science's Board on Physics and Astronomy, chairing it in 2016 and 2017. She received both the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics and the Department of Energy Distinguished Scientist Fellow Award in 2019. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2021. | |
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