| | 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: | 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. | |
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