Class
• | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
| 1 | Name: | Dr. Robin J. H. Clark | | Institution: | University College London | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | Residency: | International | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1935 | | Death Date: | December 6, 2018 | | | | | Robin Clark’s work employing Raman microscopy changed the thinking of art historians and conservators on much artwork and many archaeological artifacts. His identification of the blue pigment on the priceless Lindisfarne Gospels (715 AD) in the British Library as solely indigo, not lazurite, removed the need for the then (2004) current but improbable proposition that trade in lazurite from Afghanistan to Northumbria existed in 715 AD; in fact we know from Clark’s work that it was not established until more than two centuries later. The identification of key pigments on "Young Woman Seated on a Virginal" provided persuasive evidence consistent with a reattribution of this painting to Vermeer, in consequence of which it was sold in London for 30 million dollars in 2004. However, many Egyptian papyri supposedly worth $3 million each and dating to 1250 BC were easily identified to have been illuminated with at least 7 modern pigments, including copper phthalocyanine blue (first made in Manchester in 1936); they thus proved to be virtually worthless. Robin Clark was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2010. He died in London on December 6, 2018 at the age of 83. | |
2 | Name: | Dr. Zachary Fisk | | Institution: | University of California, Irvine | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | Following an undergraduate physics major at Harvard, I trained with Bernd Matthias at the then new University of California, San Diego, graduating in 1969. After a post doctoral year at Imperial College with Bryan Coles and a year as assistant professor at the University of Chicago, I returned as a research physicist to San Diego and spent the next decade in research on new superconducting and magnetic materials. In 1981, I went to Los Alamos National Laboratory as a staff member with the idea to study the f-electron physics of actinides from a materials driven standpoint. There followed the discovery of so-called heavy Fermion superconductivity in UBe13 and UPt3, the first examples known in this class of superconducting materials after their original discovery of in CeCu2Si2 by Steglich. These materials provided the first convincing evidence of a non-BCS and hence non-trivial superconducting order which has since been found in materials such as the high Tc cuprates. This research on superconductivity at the remarkably fertile boundary with magnetism has been my main research focus and has continued at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee (1994 - 2004) and then at the Universities of California at Davis and now Irvine.
A long standing amateur interest has been investigating the Gallina Culture of northern New Mexico. These people occupied hundreds of square miles in canyons and on high mesas along the continental divide in small, often highly defensive, villages over several centuries before vanishing in the late 13th century. My interest has been in trying to understand the physical layout of sites, many of which are well removed from food and water sources. | |
3 | Name: | Dr. William Timothy Gowers | | Institution: | University of Cambridge & Trinity College | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | Residency: | International | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1963 | | | | | Early in his career, Timothy Gowers did outstanding work in abstract Banach space theory, a theory which involves sets which are operators or functions. In a series of brilliant papers, he solved several long-standing problems, introducing extensive use of methods from combinatorial number theory. One of his surprising results is the construction of a Banach space with almost no symmetry. He is now better known to the broad mathematical community by his later work in combinatorial number theory. His very original ideas (for example "Gowers norms"), led to a new proof of Szmeredi's theorem, which concerns the occurrence of arithmetic progressions in sets of integers. His ideas have led to many breakthroughs in the field, in particular concerning the occurrence of arithmetic progressions in the primes (a longstanding conjecture of Erdos and now a theorem of Gowers’ students Ben Green and Terry Tao.) He continues to lead the research in this combinatorial number theory, which is now having impact on and benefiting computer science. Gowers has also put much effort into bringing mathematics to the public in his writing which includes his book Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (2002) and his many public lectures. He recently organized the writing of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008). This is a book of over 1,000 pages, incorporating sections by over 100 of the world's best mathematicians. It is aimed at giving anyone with some undergraduate training in mathematics a taste of current knowledge in all of modern mathematics. This kind of contribution, by one of the world's leading researchers at the height of his productive years, is very unusual. | |
4 | Name: | Dr. Anita K. Jones | | Institution: | University of Virginia | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 107 | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | Anita Jones, who is now University Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia, is a computer scientist who has made significant contributions to national science and engineering policy. Her technical work focuses on protection mechanisms and secure systems that make guarantees about how information is used. Her current focus is survivable information systems and interactive, distributed computer simulation for training, analysis, and entertainment. In June 1993, when she was appointed the Director of Defense Research and Engineering for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), she assumed responsibility for the management of the DoD's Science and Technology Program, including responsibility for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and oversight of the DoD laboratories. Her duties also incorporated being the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense for defense-related scientific and technical matters. As Director, she served in one of the nation's top technical positions and oversaw the largest defense research and development organization in the world. Jones focused the DoD program to ensure military and national preeminence in important strategic technologies while expanding the program's scope and the speed at which technology was developed and transitioned into use. Dr. Jones received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1973, joining their faculty that same year. In 1988 she moved to the University of Virginia, serving as professor and department head. She is the author of numerous papers, as well as Foundations of Secure Computation (with R. De Millo, et al, 1978). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2010. In 2011, the National Academy of Engineering presented her with the Arthur M. Bueche Award. | |
5 | Name: | Dr. Claire L. Parkinson | | Institution: | NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | Claire Parkinson is a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with a research emphasis since the late 1970s on polar sea ice and climate change. She is also keenly interested in the history and philosophy of science. Parkinson developed one of the earliest computer models of sea ice and has done field work in both the Arctic and Antarctic. However, her research centers mostly on satellite data analysis, which she has used (with others) to establish many details of the long-term trends and interannual variabilities in the Earth’s sea ice covers, including a substantial decrease in Arctic sea ice and a lesser increase in Antarctic sea ice since the late 1970s. Since 1993, Dr. Parkinson has additionally been Project Scientist for NASA’s Aqua satellite, which launched in May 2002 and is transmitting data on many atmospheric, ocean, land, and ice variables. She has written books on the history of science (Breakthroughs: A Chronology of Great Achievements in Science and Mathematics), satellite observations (Earth from Above: Using Color-Coded Satellite Images to Examine the Global Environment), and climate change (Coming Climate Crisis? Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix). She also coauthored with Warren Washington a textbook on climate modeling, coauthored atlases of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, and co-edited two books on satellite observations related to global change. Parkinson has received a NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal for her work as the Aqua Project Scientist, a NASA Exceptional Service Medal for her work on educational outreach, and the Goldthwait Polar Medal from the Byrd Polar Research Center for her sea ice research. She was awarded the 2020 Roger Revelle Medal. She is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and Phi Beta Kappa and is on the Council and Committee on Council Affairs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. Her B.A. degree is from Wellesley College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from Ohio State University. She frequently speaks to teachers, students, and the general public, on topics including global ice coverage, climate change, the Aqua satellite mission, and the value of satellite observations. | |
6 | Name: | Dr. Lisa Randall | | Institution: | Harvard University | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1962 | | | | | Lisa Randall's papers with Raman Sundrum on the brane-world with warped extra dimensions are two of the five most highly cited works in high energy theory in the last 20 years. This should not come as a surprise though, as the papers effectively open up new directions in so many different areas of particle theory. Her ideas have shaped the discourse in the field from collider phenomenology to cosmology. An unusually broad and powerful field theorist, Randall has also made important contributions to the theory of supersymmetry breaking and phenomenology, inflation, CP violation, electroweak radiative corrections, the axion, heavy quark physics, and dynamical symmetry breaking. Randall's book Warped Passages, describing the brane-world picture without mathematics, is remarkably successful outreach to the general public and was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2005. Her recent books include Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminated the Universe and the Modern World (with Gino Segre, 2012) and Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe (2015). She has received the Premio Caterina Tomassoni e Felice Pietro Chisesi Award from the University of Rome (2003), the Klopsteg Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers (2006), and the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society (2007).
Lisa Randall earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1987 and held professorships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University before returning to Harvard in 2001. She currently serves as Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Lisa Randall was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2010. | |
7 | Name: | Dr. Shlomo Sternberg | | Institution: | Harvard University | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1936 | | Death Date: | 8/23/2024 | | | | | Shlomo Sternberg is one of the foremost differential geometers of his generation and a mathematician who has shaped the subject with his extensive breadth and many scholarly contributions. His papers extend across many subjects, including Lie groups (finite and infinite dimensional), symplectic geometry and mechanics, quantum groups, scattering theory, conformal field theory - the list is long and inclusive of many subjects. He has written several books with V. Guillemin which are foundational references for research mathematicians in several fields, including Geometric Asymptotics (1977), Variations on a Theme by Kepler, (1990), and Symplectic Techniques in Physics (1990), as well as several of the basic graduate texts for students of mathematics and physics. He currently serves as George Putnam Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, having joined the Harvard faculty in 1959. He received his Ph.D. in 1956 from Johns Hopkins University. In 1980 he was made a permanent Fellow of the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2010. | |
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