Renfrey Potts

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Renfrey "Ren" Burnard Potts (born October 4, 1925 in Adelaide ; † August 9, 2005 ibid) was an Australian mathematical and theoretical physicist and applied mathematician, known for work in statistical mechanics and the theory of traffic flows.

Life

Potts went to school in Adelaide, where his father was a teacher, studied at Adelaide University from 1943 to 1947 (first engineering and then mathematics) and then from 1948 as a Rhodes scholarship holder at Oxford University ( Queen's College ), where he worked in 1951 Cyril Domb holds a PhD (The Mathematical Investigation of Some Cooperative Phenomena). He was then a lecturer at Adelaide University from 1951 to 1957. In 1955/56 he was a post-doc at the University of Maryland and from 1957 to 1959 Associate Professor at the University of Toronto , while at the same time he was a consultant at General Motors in Detroit in 1958/59 , where he examined microscopic models for car traffic (car following models ). From 1959 until his retirement in 1990 he was Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaide , a newly created chair at the time. Among other things, he was head of the Institute for Applied Mathematics and dean of the mathematical faculty. In 1968 he received a Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) from Oxford University. From 1991 to 1993 he was visiting professor at the National University of Singapore .

In 1991 he became Officer of the Order of Australia and in 2001 he was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal. In 1975 he became a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences and 1983 of the Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering . In 1995 he was the first to receive the medal from ANZIAM (the Applied Mathematics Section of the Australian Mathematical Society ). 1978/79 he was chairman of the applied mathematics section (the ANZIAM predecessor) of the Australian Mathematical Society and since 1994 a fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society.

He had been married to Barbara Kidman , a doctor of physics and computer science professor in Adelaide, since 1950 and had two daughters. In his spare time he was an active athlete and played classical music (piano, clarinet).

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As an applied mathematician, he dealt early on with operations research (for which he received the Lanchester Prize in 1959) and especially the analysis of traffic flows. He also dealt with robotics, network theory, differential and difference equations and matrix theory. He was also early on with computers and was a co-founder of the South Australian Computer Society, the forerunner of the Australian Computer Society, of which he was a Fellow (FACS). He published about 90 research papers and was a popular teacher who supervised twenty PhD students. He was a leader in applied mathematics in Australia and also active in mathematics didactics, for example he organized the 5th International Conference on Mathematics Education in Adelaide in 1984 and the Mathematics Olympiad in Canberra in 1988.

The Potts model comes from him, a generalization of the Ising model . It was introduced by Potts in 1952 (following a suggestion by Cyril Domb ). It is defined on two-dimensional grids or graphs in general, with spins in the nodes that can take q different discrete values. The interaction energy is -J if the neighboring spins are equal, otherwise zero. For q = 2 and a two-dimensional lattice it is equivalent to the Ising model without an external field. Exact solutions are only known in a few cases (such as the Ising model). A solution is also known at the critical point (Temperley and Elliott Lieb and the Australian Rodney Baxter in the 1970s).

Prizes and awards

literature

  • EO Tuck Retirement of Professor RB Potts , Australia Math.Soc. Gazette Vol. 18, 1991, No. 4, pp. 111-112, online, PDF file
  • Potts, Robert Oliver Flows in transportation networks , Academic Press 1972
  • Potts Differential and Difference Equations , American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 89, 1982, pp. 402-407

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Among other things, he was able to successfully determine the optimal speed in the New York Holland Tunnel in heavy traffic from observations with only two cars at the General Motors test site
  2. ^ Potts Some generalizations of order-disorder transformations , Proc. Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol. 48, 1952, pp. 106-109
  3. ^ Baxter Exactly solvable models in statistical Mechanics , p. 322
  4. ^ Proc. Roy. Soc. A, Vol. 322, 1971, p. 251. They show the equivalence to the six-vertex model and their algebraic analysis (Temperley-Lieb Algebra) later provided connections to the knot theory and theory of braids.
  5. ^ Frederick W. Lanchester Prize. (No longer available online.) Informs.org ( Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences ), archived from the original on October 2, 2015 ; accessed on February 16, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.informs.org
personal data
SURNAME Potts, Renfrey
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Potts, Renfrey Burnard (full name); Potts, Ren Burnard (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian physicist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Adelaide
DATE OF DEATH August 9, 2005
Place of death Adelaide