John Greene (physicist)

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John Morgan Greene (born September 22, 1928 in Pittsburgh , † October 22, 2007 in San Diego ) was an American theoretical physicist and applied mathematician, who is known for his work on the theory of solitons and contributions to plasma physics .

Greene's father was a professor of chemical engineering at Kansas State College. He studied with a scholarship from Pepsi-Cola at Caltech (bachelor's degree in 1950) after multiple victories in the state mathematics competitions of the state of Kansas and received his doctorate in nuclear physics from the University of Rochester in 1956 . He then worked in the plasma physics laboratory at Princeton University (initially still Project Matterhorn ), where he was one of the leading theoretical physicists and stayed until 1982. From 1982 he was Senior Technical Adviser in the theory group at General Atomics and at the same time Adjunct Professor at the University of California, San Diego . He died of complications from Parkinson's disease.

He has authored a series of papers in collaboration with John Johnson and Katherine Weimer on the equilibrium and instabilities of tokamak and stellarator plasmas in magnetohydrodynamics . With Johnson and Ray Grimm he developed the special computer code PEST (Princeton Equilibrium and Stability in Tokamaks Code). With Bruno Coppi and others he investigated dissipative instabilities. With Ira Bernstein and Martin Kruskal , he introduced BKG Moden in 1957 (non-linear wave solutions in plasma physics).

In 2006 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize with Martin Kruskal , Robert Miura and Clifford Gardner . for her work on the inverse scattering transformation method in the theory of solitons.

In the 1970s he dealt with Hamiltonian dynamics in chaos theory (Greene's criterion of the collapse of tori in KAM theory 1979).

He had been married since 1956 and had one daughter.

In 1992 he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics . He was a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Geophysical Union.

Web links

References

  1. ↑ Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, Miura, Korteweg-de-Vries equation and generalizations VI: Methods for exact solution , Comm. Pure Applied Mathematics, Vol. 27, 1974, pp. 97-133
  2. ↑ Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, Miura, Method for Solving the Korteweg-deVries Equation , Physical Review Letters, Volume 19, 1967, pp. 1095-1097
personal data
SURNAME Greene, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Greene, John Morgan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theoretical physicist and applied mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 22, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh
DATE OF DEATH October 22, 2007
Place of death San Diego