John Trevor Lewis
John Trevor Lewis (born April 15, 1932 in Swansea , † January 21, 2004 ) was a British mathematician and mathematical physicist. He is one of the pioneers of quantum stochastics (non-commutative probability theory).
Lewis was the son of a shipbroker, went to school in Cardiff and from 1948 in Belfast and studied from 1949 at Queen's University in Belfast with a bachelor's degree in 1952 and a doctorate in 1955 with Alexander Dalgarno and David R. Bates (Quantal Calculations Relating to Certain Rate Processes) 1955/56 he was a post-doctoral student at Oxford University under Charles A. Coulson and was a lecturer in Oxford at Christ Church College from 1957 to 1959. In 1959 he moved to Brasenose College, where he was a tutorial fellow from 1960 to 1972. From 1964 to 1967 he was Dean and from 1966 University Lecturer. In 1969 he was visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study and in 1970 at Rockefeller University with Mark Kac . In 1972 he went to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) as a professor to succeed John L. Synge . He opened the DIAS to other scientists in Ireland and was instrumental in preventing its threatened closure in 1988. He retired from DIAS in 2002. He also taught for many years at University College Dublin and Trinity College, Dublin, of which he received an honorary professorship in 1999.
From 1982 to 1989 he was on the Executive Committee of the International Association of Mathematical Physics , whose congress he brought to Swansea in 1988. Among other things, he was visiting scholar at the University of Warwick and in Groningen (where he worked with Nicolaas Marinus Hugenholtz and Marinus Winnink ), held an honorary professorship in Swansea from 1992 to 1995, where a conference was held in 1997 on his 65th birthday, and from 1998 in Cardiff. In 1989 he visited Russia as a guest of the Steklov Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
From 1985 to 1987 he was President of the Irish Federation of University Teachers. In 1977 he became a member of the Royal Irish Academy and its President from 1999 to 2001.
As a mathematical physicist, he dealt with very different areas such as theoretical chemistry and methods of variation in quantum mechanical perturbation theory, the Ising model (which he treated with methods of operator algebras), the mathematics of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics (inspired by lectures by George Mackey in Oxford in 1966 / 67 and in collaboration with Brian Davies), Brownian motion on hypersurfaces, Bose-Einstein condensation (also stimulated by Kac), quantum mechanical treatment of thermodynamics and quantum stochastic processes. The latter was suggested by Mark Kac during his visit to New York. He worked on this with his student Lyn Thomas, David Evans, and George W. Ford. The joint monograph with Evans from 1977 was influential in the development of quantum stochastics, as was an essay with Luigi Accardi and Alberto Frigerio.
In the 1990s he began to be interested in applications in communication technology, stimulated by a visit to Roland Lwowitsch Dobruschin's laboratory in Moscow, which was partly financed in this way. His application of probability theory (Large Deviation Theory) to Internet communication (e.g. routing queuing behavior) also led to the establishment of his own company (Corvil) and in 2001 he set up the Communication Network Research Institute (CNRI) of the Dublin Institute of Technology , with a Principal Investigator Award from Science Foundation Ireland.
Robin Lyth Hudson is one of his PhD students .
He had been married to the chemist Maureen McEntin since 1959, with whom he had four children.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project . Duffy and Pulè name Bates as their PhD supervisor.
- ^ Evans, Lewis Dilations of irreversible evolutions in algebraic quantum theory , Comm. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Series A, 24, 1977
- ↑ Accardi, Frigerio, Lewis Quantum stochastic processes , Publ. Res. Inst. Math. Sci., Vol. 18, 1982, pp. 97-133
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lewis, John Trevor |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British mathematician and physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 15, 1932 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Swansea |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 21, 2004 |