Robert Twenty

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Walter Zwanzig (born April 9, 1928 in Brooklyn ; † May 15, 2014 ) was an American theoretical physicist and chemist who dealt with the statistical mechanics of irreversible processes, physical chemistry, biophysics, and the theory of gases and liquids.

Life

Twenty received his bachelor's degree from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1948 and his master's degree from the University of Southern California in 1950 . In 1952 he received his doctorate at Caltech in physical chemistry with John G. Kirkwood (title of the dissertation: Quantum Hydrodynamics: a statistical mechanical theory of light scattering from simple non-polar fluids ). From 1951 to 1954 he did research as a post-doctoral student in theoretical chemistry at Yale University , was from 1954 to 1958 Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University and from 1958 to 1966 as a physical chemist at the National Bureau of Standards . From 1966 to 1979 he was a research professor at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland , where he was Distinguished Professor until 1988 . 1974/75 he was a Fairchild Scholar at Caltech . From 1988 he was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases) in Bethesda (Maryland) , where he was a Fogarty Scholar in 1987/88 and where he was still doing research as Scientist Emeritus .

In the early 1960s he wrote some of the now classic papers on non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of irreversible processes. He developed a projection operator method, which made it possible to obtain irreversible transport equations (such as the Boltzmann equation , Langevin equation ) and master equations from microscopic quantum mechanical dynamic equations (reversible in time) (quantum mechanical Liouville equation with various Hamilton operators). He was inspired by the theories of Ilja Prigogine (who gave lectures at the National Bureau of Standards in 1959) and Leon van Hove . His theory reproduced the results of Prigogine and van Hove obtained with complicated diagrammatic methods similar to the quantum field theory and perturbation theory of infinitely high order in a simple manner, was later widely used and is known as the Mori-Twenty Formalism (additionally named after Hazime Mori in Japan, the about it published in 1965, sometimes only as a Mori formalism).

Projection operator techniques were also independently introduced in 1958 by Sadao Nakajima and in 1962 by Prigogine and other members of the Brussels School of Irreversible Statistical Mechanics.

Later he dealt among other things with the mechanisms of protein folding .

In 1976 he received the Peter Debye Award , 1985 the Irving Langmuir Award and 1994 the Joel Henry Hildebrand Award of the American Chemical Society . He was a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Chemical Society. In 1974 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He had been married since 1953 and had two children.

Fonts

  • Statistical mechanics of irreversibility , in: WE Brittin, BW Downs, J. Downs (editor) Lectures in Theoretical Physics (Boulder, 1960) , New York, Interscience 1961
  • Ensemble Method in the Theory of Irreversibility , J. Chemical Physics, Volume 33, 1960, pp. 1338-1341 ( Nakajima twenty equation , Mori twenty formalism), twenty on his work from 1960, Science Citation Classic, pdf
  • Time-correlation functions and transport coefficients in statistical mechanics , Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, Volume 16, 1965, pp. 67-102 (review article)
  • Memory effects in irreversible thermodynamics , Physical Review, Volume 124, 1961, p. 981
  • Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics , Oxford University Press 2004
  • Dynamical disorder: passage through a fluctuating bottleneck , J. of Chemical Physics, Volume 97, 1992, pp. 3587-3589

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ Represented, for example, by Hermann Grabert Projection operator techniques in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics , Springer Tracts in Modern Physics, Volume 95, 1982.
  3. ^ Mori Transport, collective motion and brownian motion , Progr. Theor. Phys., Suppl., Vol. 33, 1965, pp. 423-455.
  4. ↑ Nakajima On quantum theory of transport phenomena , Progress Theoretical Physics, Volume 20, 1958, pp. 948-959.
  5. ^ In Prigogine Non equilibrium statistical mechanics , Interscience 1962.
  6. ^ Breuer, Petruccione Theory of Open Quantum Systems , Oxford University Press, 2002, Chapter 9 (Projection Operator Techniques), p. 441.
  7. ↑ Twenty Two State Models of Protein Folding , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 94, 1997, pp. 148-150, Twenty Simple model of protein folding kinetics , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 92, 1995, pp. 9801-9804, twenty, A. Szabo, B. Bagchi Levinthal's Paradox , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 89, 1992, pp. 20-22.
personal data
SURNAME Twenty, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Twenty, Robert Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and chemist
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn
DATE OF DEATH May 15, 2014