Class
| • | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
| | 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 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. | |
| 4 | 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." | |
| 5 | 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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