Benjamin Widom

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Benjamin Widom (* 1927 ) is an American chemist and physicist who deals with statistical mechanics and physical chemistry.

Live and act

Widom attended Stuyvesant High School in New York and then studied chemistry and physics (among others with Hans Bethe , Mark Kac and Philip Morrison ) at Columbia University (bachelor's degree in 1949) and at Cornell University , where he studied with Simon Bauer in 1953 PhD was awarded with a thesis on the transmission of vibrational energy in the case of molecular collisions in gases. After a postdoctoral stay with Oscar K. Rice (1903-1978) from 1952 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , where he was already occupied with phase transitions, he became an instructor in 1954, assistant professor in 1955 and professor of chemistry in 1963 from Cornell University, where he now holds the Goldwin Smith Professorship. 1978 to 1981 he was chairman of the chemistry department at Cornell.

Widom is best known for his discovery of scaling behavior and of relations between the critical exponents of phase transitions e.g. B. of liquids near the critical points in the 1960s, later fully described in the renormalization group theory by Kenneth Wilson . He also investigated phase equilibria and the behavior at phase boundaries (such as surface tension, capillarity).

Widom received the Dickson Prize in Science in 1986 , the Boltzmann Medal in 1998 , the Boris Pregel Award from the New York Academy of Sciences , the Langmuir and Joel Henry Hildebrand Award from the American Chemical Society , the Onsager Medal from the University of Trondheim, the Bakhus Roozeboom Medal of the Dutch Academy of Sciences . He has been a member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 1974 , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1979, and the American Philosophical Society since 1993 . He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and Utrecht University .

His brother Harold Widom was a math professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His son Michael Widom is a professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Fonts

  • Surface Tension and Molecular Correlations near the Critical Point , J. Chem. Phys. 43 (1965) 3892-3897.
  • Equation of State in the Neighborhood of the Critical Point , J. Chem. Phys. 43 (1965) 3898-3905.
  • Statistical mechanics- a concise introduction for chemists , Cambridge University Press 2002
  • with John Shipley Rowlinson : Molecular theory of capillarity , Oxford, Clarendon Press 1989

literature

  • Eugene Stanley , CM Knobler, A. Robledo (editors): Statistical Mechanics in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences: Festschrift in Honor of Benjamin Widom on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday , Elsevier 1997, Special Issue by Physica A

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Original quote from the awarding of the 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 . "
personal data
SURNAME Widom, Benjamin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1927