Rolf Landauer

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Rolf Wilhelm (William) Landauer (born February 4, 1927 in Stuttgart , † April 27, 1999 in Briarcliff Manor , New York ) was a German-American physicist and information scientist.

In 1938, Landauer, then 11 years old, had to leave the then National Socialist Germany with his family. He studied at Harvard University (Bachelor 1945, Master 1947), where he received his doctorate in physics in 1950. 1950 to 1952 he was a physicist on the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics at the Lewis Laboratory. Since 1952 he was a physicist at IBM . From 1961 to 1966 he was director of physics and from 1966 to 1969 Assistant Director of Research. From 1969 he was an IBM Fellow . In 1959 he also became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

Landauer became known through the formulation of the Landauer principle named after him , which assigns a concrete loss of energy to the irreversible deletion of information and at the same time solves the dilemma of Maxwell's demon . At the same time, he showed that reading and writing information under ideal conditions is free of energy costs.

The prerequisite for this discovery was his conviction that information cannot be abstract, but must inevitably have a physical embodiment: “Information is physical”. For the first time, the Landauer principle directly links the thermodynamic concept of entropy with the information-theoretical concept of entropy . In this respect, Landauer's work has a special key position for a number of other theories that build on this link.

In an analysis of Landauer's theses from 2000, Orly R. Shenker points to various breaks in Landauer's argumentation that she believes can be traced back to an inadmissible combination of the term dissipation , both in information theory how thermodynamics is used. In 2012, however, a research group from Lyon, Kaiserslautern and Augsburg succeeded in experimentally confirming the Landauer principle.

In 1995 he received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize of the American Physical Society . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1988 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1992 .

Works

  • Rolf Landauer, Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process , IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 5, pp. 183-191, 1961.
  • Rolf Landauer, The Physical Nature of Information , Physics Letters A 217 (1996): 188-193

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pro physics: Maxwell's demon disenchanted? March 13, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Landauer, Rolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Landauer, Rolf Wilhelm; Landauer, Rolf William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American physicist and information scientist
DATE OF BIRTH February 4, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH April 27, 1999
Place of death Briarcliff Manor , New York