Rodney Baxter

Rodney Baxter (1999)

Rodney James Baxter (born February 8, 1940 in London ) is an Australian mathematical physicist, known for his investigation of exactly solvable lattice models of statistical mechanics .

Baxter studied until his bachelor's degree in Cambridge and at the Australian National University in Canberra , where he graduated and earned his doctorate in 1964. 1964/5 he worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company in London, was a professor at MIT from 1968 to 1970 and then at the University of Canberra, where he was head of the department of theoretical physics and the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2002 he was retired there. In 1992 he was Royal Society Research Professor at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge.

Baxter became known when he calculated the free energy of the 8-vertex model in 1971 with his "Star-Triangle Relation" (later Yang-Baxter equations) . Lars Onsager had previously given his famous exact solution of the two-dimensional Ising model in 1944 and Elliott H. Lieb in the 1960s had given the solution of further grid models. Baxter's model contained these models (which e.g. serve as simplified study objects of magnetic systems in solids) as special cases. Baxter also used similar methods to solve other two-dimensional models such as the "Hard Hexagon Model" in 1980 and the chiral Potts model (after Renfrey Potts ) in 1988 . He summarized his work in his standard work “Exactly solvable models in statistical mechanics” (Academic Press, London 1982). The Yang-Baxter equation , named after him and Chen Ning Yang , later became one of the starting points of the theory of quantum groups (by Vladimir Drinfeld et al.) And is the fundamental identity that in many cases is behind the exact solvability of models of statistical mechanics.

In 1980 he received the Boltzmann Medal , in 1984 an honorary doctorate from Cambridge, in 1987 the Dannie Heineman Prize and in 2006 the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society . He has been a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences since 1977 and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society in London since 1982 . In 2003 he received the Australian Government's Centenary Medal. In 1990 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyōto ( Hyperelliptic function parametrization for the chiral Potts model ). In 2013 he received the Royal Medal .

Web links

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Notes and sources

1. ↑ Rodney Baxter: The eight vertex model in lattice statistics . In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 26, 1971, p. 832 (online here )