Keith Symon

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Keith Randolph Symon (born March 25, 1920 in Fort Wayne , Indiana , † December 16, 2013 in Spring Green , Wisconsin ) was an American physicist who studied particle accelerators and plasma physics.

Symon received his PhD from Harvard University in 1948 . From 1947 to 1955 he was on the faculty of Wayne State University in Detroit . From 1955 he was at the University of Wisconsin – Madison , where he retired in 1990. 1956 to 1967 he was also at the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA), whose technical director he was 1957 to 1960. In 1982/83 he was head of the computer center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and from 1983 to 1985 of its synchrotron radiation laboratory.

Symon worked at Fermilab , Argonne National Laboratory , Brookhaven National Laboratory , facilities in Los Alamos and La Jolla, and conducted research at CERN in Geneva , Switzerland, where he and his family lived for a year in 1962 and 1963.

Along with Tihiro Ohkawa in Japan and Andrei Kolomensky in the Soviet Union, he is the inventor of the Fixed-Field-Alternating Gradient Accelerator (FFAG). The concept was studied by Symon, Donald Kerst and others in the 1950s and small model systems were built. FFAGs were then neglected for a long time and only took off again in the 1990s, for example in Japan. Symon is also known for theoretical work in plasma physics, including the development of mathematical numerical methods. He wrote a mechanics textbook.

In 2005 he received the Robert R. Wilson Prize .

He had been married since 1943 and had four children from the marriage. In addition to physics, he pursued outdoor activities such as white water canoeing and was co-organizer of a literature festival (Spring Green Literary Festival).

literature

  • Andrew Sessler, Edmund Wilson Engines of Discovery , World Scientific 2007
  • Symon Mechanics , Addison-Wesley, 3rd edition 1971
  • Symon, Kerst, LW Jones, LJ Laslett, KM Terwilliger Fixed-Field Alternating-Gradient Particle Accelerators , Physical Review, Volume 103, 1956, p. 1837

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Symon, Keith Randolph . madison.com. December 21, 2013. Accessed July 30, 2019.
  2. ↑ Michael Craddock, The rebirth of the FFAG, CERN Courier 2004
personal data
SURNAME Symon, Keith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Symon, Keith R.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Fort Wayne , Indiana
DATE OF DEATH December 16, 2013
Place of death Spring Green , Wisconsin