Daniel J. Amit

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Daniel Amit

Daniel J. Amit (born May 5, 1938 in Lodz , † November 4, 2007 in Jerusalem ) was an Israeli physicist.

Amit came from a wealthy Jewish family in Lodz and fled with his parents in 1940 after the German occupation via Italy to Palestine ( Tel Aviv ). He studied physics at the Hebrew University with a bachelor's degree in 1961 and at the Weizmann Institute with a master's degree. He then served two years in the Israeli army in the then newly created IT department. At that time he published among other things on theoretical nuclear physics. In 1963 he received his doctorate from Brandeis University under Eugene Gross (On the Bose liquid). At that time he dealt with quantum liquids such as liquid helium and also in the 1970s mainly with statistical mechanics (including Potts model and phase transitions in it, two-dimensional Coulomb gas, renormalization group by Kenneth Wilson , self-avoiding random walk, generalized Heisenberg models) and since the beginning of the 1980s with neural networks (known work on the Hopfield model with Hanoch Gutfreund, Haim Sompolinsky from 1985) and their connection with statistical mechanics. He was a professor at the Racah Institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was also a professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza. In 2007 he committed suicide at his home in Jerusalem.

In 1982/83 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study .

His textbook Field Theory, the renormalization group and critical phenomena was the first textbook to address the renormalization group as a link between statistical mechanics and quantum field theory and played an important role in the development of this very active field of research.

He was politically active in reconciliation with the Palestinians and for a long time chairman of the solidarity committee with Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. Under the influence of the Vietnam War demonstrations, he and others founded the New Israeli Left (SIAH) on his return to Israel from the USA in 1967. During a sabbatical year in Paris in 1975, he made contact with PLO leaders. He was also involved in founding the Israeli Civil Rights Association and in founding the Mifras publishing house, which published Palestinian authors in Hebrew. Later he was deeply disappointed with the political developments, for example the US invasion of Iraq (for this reason he refused to continue doing Physical Review Letters Peer Review).

Fonts

  • Nicolas Brunel, Paolo del Giudice, Giorgio Parisi, Stefano Fusi, Misha Tsodyks (Eds.): Selected Papers of Daniel J. Amit, World Scientific 2013 (with biography of Yali Amit, the selected publications concern neural networks)
  • Modeling brain function. The world of attractor neural networks, Cambridge University Press 1989
  • with Yosef Verbin: Statistical physics. An introductory course, World Scientific 1999
  • with Victor-Martin Mayor: Field Theory, the Renormalization Group, and Critical Phenomena, World Scientific, 3rd edition 2005 (first as sole author 1984)
  • with EP Gross: Theory of a low-density bose liquid, Annals of Physics, Volume 42, 1967, pp. 296-314.
  • The Hebbian paradigm reintegrated-local reverbretations as internal representations, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 18, 1995, pp. 617-626

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Amit, Katz, Effective interaction calculations of energy levels and wave functions in the nuclear 1p shell, Nuclear Physics, Volume 58, 1964, pp. 388-406.
  2. ↑ Amit, Gutfreund, Sompolinsky, Spin-glass models of neural networks, Phys. Rev. A, Vol. 32, 1985, p. 1007
  3. ↑ Amit, Gutfreund, Sompolinsky, Storing infinite numbers of patterns in a spin-glass-model of neural networks, Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 55, 1985, p. 1530
  4. ↑ Amit, Gutfreund, Sompolinsky, Statistical mechanics of neural networks near saturation, Annals of Physics, Volume 173, 1987, pp. 30-67
  5. ^ Giorgio Parisi, in Selected Papers of Daniel J. Amit, World Scientific, p. 16
  6. ↑ Biography in the Selected Papers by Amit, by Yali Amit, World Scientific, p. 13
personal data
SURNAME Amit, Daniel J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 5, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Lodz
DATE OF DEATH November 4, 2007
Place of death Jerusalem