Theodore H. Berlin

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Theodore H. Berlin , called Ted Berlin, (born May 8, 1917 in New York City , † November 16, 1962 in Baltimore ) was an American theoretical physicist who mainly dealt with statistical mechanics . He was a professor at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City.

Berlin studied at the Cooper Union Institute of Technology ( bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1939) and at the University of Michigan , where he received his master's degree in 1940 and his doctorate in 1944 under Kasimir Fajans . The dissertation was on the quantum mechanical treatment of the electrical interaction of diatomic molecules. From 1944 to 1946 he was a research physicist at the University of Michigan. During the Second World War he was still working as a student on the development of distance fuses . He was from 1946 at Johns Hopkins University , where he was from 1946 Lecturer , from 1949 Associate Professor and from 1955 Professor. In between he was an Associate Professor at Northwestern University in 1948/49 . From 1961 he was a professor at Rockefeller University. He worked with George Uhlenbeck , whose student he was at the University of Michigan, and Mark Kac , with whom he was friends. Together they founded the Department of Mathematics and Physics at Rockefeller University. He died unexpectedly in 1962 and is buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery in Baltimore. A garden was created in his memory at Rockefeller University after his death.

Initially he dealt with physical chemistry (quantum theory of molecules). His work with Kac on the spherical model is known , a generalization of the Ising model of statistical mechanics, which were intended as mathematical model systems for ferromagnets . In contrast to the Ising model, the spin variable on the grid can assume continuous values ​​here (with the restriction that the sum of the squares of the spins is equal to the number of grid positions). It can be solved exactly and shows no phase transition for values ​​of the spatial dimension d = 1 or 2 (in contrast to the Ising model) and for d greater than 2 a ferromagnetic phase transition with Curie temperature , whereby the critical exponents for more than four dimensions are independent of the dimension are.

In 1952/53 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Guggenheim Fellow. Louis Witten (1951) is one of his doctoral students .

He served on the editorial board of the Journal of Chemical Physics, Physical Review, and Physical Review Letters. Shortly before his death, he became a member of the editorial board of Physics of Fluids . Berlin was a fellow of the American Physical Society .

In 1944 he married Patricia May Cleary, with whom he had four sons.

literature

  • Mark Kac The work of TH Berlin in statistical mechanics. A personal reminiscence , Physics Today, October 1964

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Published as: Berlin, Fajans: Quantization of molecules. Inter and intramolecular forces, Phys. Rev., Volume 63, 1943, p. 309, Errata p. 399
  2. ↑ Lillian Hoddeson et al. a .: Out of the crystal maze, Oxford UP 1992, p. 574
  3. ↑ Berlin, Kac The Spherical Model of a Ferromagnet , Physical Review, Volume 86, 1952, pp. 821-835, abstract
personal data
SURNAME Berlin, Theodore H.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berlin, Ted
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 8, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH November 16, 1962
Place of death Baltimore