Joseph L. Birman
Joseph Leon Birman (born May 21, 1927 in New York City , † October 1, 2016 in New Rochelle ) was an American theoretical solid-state physicist .
Life
Birman was the son of a salesman, attended the Bronx High School of Science (graduated in 1943), graduated from City College of New York with a bachelor's degree in 1947, and Columbia University with a master's degree in 1950 and a doctorate in theoretical chemistry 1952. He then worked for around ten years at an electronics and telecommunications research laboratory (the later GTE Research Labs in Queens) in New York (head of luminescence). From 1962 he was a professor at New York University and from 1974 professor at the City College of New York. Most recently he was Distinguished Professor there.
In 1969/70 he was visiting professor in Paris. In 1974 he received an honorary doctorate in Rennes. He was a Guggenheim Fellow , Lady Davis Fellow at the Technion in Haifa, and was a Fellow of the American Physical Society , the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the New York Academy of Sciences.
As early as the 1970s, Birman organized symposia between American and Soviet scientists in Moscow, New York and Saint Petersburg. In particular, he supported mostly Jewish scientists in the Soviet Union who were refused entry (Birman himself was the grandson of Jewish grandparents who emigrated from Russia). In the 1990s, he and Pierre Hohenberg organized a support program for scientists who had emigrated to the USA, especially from Eastern Europe and China. In 2010 he was awarded the Andrei Sakharov Prize of the American Physical Society, of which he was a member of the Human Rights Committee. In 2006 he received the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award from the New York Academy of Sciences.
He was married to the mathematician Joan Birman since 1950 . They have two sons and a daughter.
Fonts
- Theory of Crystal Space Groups and Lattice Dynamics: Infrared and Raman Optical Process in Insulating Crystals. In: Handbook of Physics . 1974, doi: 10.1007 / 978-3-642-69707-4_1
literature
- Eugene M. Chudnovsky: Joseph L. Birman (1927-2016). In: Nature . Volume 539, No. 7629, 2016, p. 358, doi: 10.1038 / 539358a
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Date of birth and career dates from American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
- ↑ Anita Gates: Joseph L. Birman, Physicist Who Aided Dissident Scientists, Dies at 89. The New York Times , October 13, 2016, accessed October 22, 2016 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Birman, Joseph L. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Birman, Joseph Leon (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American theoretical solid-state physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 21, 1927 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York City |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 1, 2016 |
| Place of death | New Rochelle |