Gordon Baym

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Gordon Alan Baym (born July 1, 1935 in New York City ) is an American theoretical physicist .

Live and act

Baym studied physics and mathematics (Masters degree in mathematics from Harvard 1957) at Cornell University (Bachelor 1957) and at Harvard University . In 1960 he received his doctorate at Harvard under Julian Schwinger and then spent two years as a post-doc at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen (he was there and at Nordita , later often as a visiting scientist, e.g. 1970, 1976) and one year at University of Berkeley . From 1963 he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor and in 1968 as a full professor . He wrote a quantum mechanics textbook well known in the USA . Baym was u. a. Visiting scholar in Kyoto (1968), Nagoya and Tokyo (2001), the École normal supérieure (1999) and the Academia Sinica (1979).

Baym was particularly concerned with the behavior of matter under extreme conditions, e.g. B. in neutron stars (partly in collaboration with Hans Bethe , Pethick) and heavy ion collisions ( pion condensate , quark-gluon plasma ). In this context he was also significantly involved in the creation of the heavy ion accelerator RHIC at the Brookhaven National Laboratory . He also dealt with nuclear physics many-particle theory and Bose-Einstein condensates .

In 1965 he became a Sloan Research Fellow and in 1969 a Fellow of the American Physical Society . He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1982 (where he was Chairman of the Physics Section), of the American Philosophical Society since 2000, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1981 . In 1985 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 2002 he received the Hans A. Bethe Prize . In 2008 he received the Lars Onsager Prize with Christopher Pethick and Tin-Lun Ho . In 2011 he was awarded the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal .

Baym was married first to Nina Zippin and later to Lillian Hoddeson . His four children are also active in research and teaching.

literature

  • with Leo Kadanoff : Quantum Statistical Mechanics. Benjamin 1962.
  • Lectures on Quantum Mechanics . Benjamin 1969.
  • with Christopher J.Pethick: Landau Fermi-Liquid Theory: Concepts and Applications. Wiley 1991.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gordon Baym in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
personal data
SURNAME Baym, Gordon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baym, Gordon Alan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City