Edward Frieman

Edward Allan Frieman (born January 19, 1926 in New York City , † April 11, 2013 in La Jolla ) was an American physicist who mainly dealt with plasma physics.

Frieman studied at Columbia University (Bachelor's degree in 1946) and at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University ( Brooklyn Polytechnic), where he made his master's degree in physics in 1948 and received his doctorate in 1951. From 1945 he was an instructor in physics at Princeton University . In 1952 he became a scientist on the Matterhorn project (nuclear fusion experiments with magnetic confinement) at Princeton University, whose theory group he led from 1954. In 1961 he became head of the theory group in the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University. 1964 to 1979 he was its deputy director.

In 1961 he became professor of astrophysics at Princeton University. From 1979 to 1981 he was Assistant Secretary and Director of the DOE's Energy Research Department . 1981 to 1986 he was Executive Vice President of Science Applications International Corporation, whose Senior Vice President he was from 1996.

From 1986 to 1996 he was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and at the same time Vice Chancellor Marine Science at the University of California, San Diego , where he had also been a professor since 1996.

He was an advisor to the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1953 to 1964 and was a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group from 1960 to 1979 . From 1987 he was on the site's selection committee for the Superconducting Super Collider . 1981 to 1989 he was vice chairman of the scientific advisory board for the US President (White House Science Council).

In 1981 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences . He was a fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Physical Society , whose Richtmyer Award he received. He received the Distinguished Service Medal of the DOE and in 2002 he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for contributions to the theory of magnetically confined plasmas, including fundamental work on the formulation of the MHD - energy principle and on linear and nonlinear gyrokinetic theory as essential Basis for the analysis of micro-instabilities and transport in plasmas.

Web links

• Biography at the APS
• Biography on the occasion of the Maxwell Prize

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Former Scripps Director, prominent physicist, and government advisor Edward A. Frieman has died at 87 ( Memento of the original from May 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Laudation for the Maxwell Prize: For contributions to the theory of magnetically confined plasmas, including fundamental work on the formulation of the MHD Energy Principle and on the foundations of linear and nonlinear gyrokinetic theory essential to the analysis of microinstabilities and transport.