Thomas Witten

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thomas Adams Witten (born August 24, 1944 in Raleigh , North Carolina ) is an American theoretical physicist who is a professor at the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago . He is known for the Witten-Sander model in diffusion-limited growth and deals with soft matter .

Live and act

Witten graduated from Reed College with a bachelor's degree in 1966 and received a PhD in physics from the University of California, San Diego in 1971 . As a post-doctoral student he was an instructor at Princeton University until 1974 and at the French nuclear research center in Saclay in 1974/75 . From 1975 to 1982 he was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and researched for Exxon from 1982 to 1989 . From 1989 he was a professor at the University of Chicago.

He dealt with collective mechanisms of the spontaneous formation of structures, for example in polymer solutions, evaporating drops of liquid, surfactant layers and thin elastic layers. This reflects both competing mechanical and external forces as well as the statistical properties of the underlying substances.

In 2002 Witten was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts

  • Structured Fluids: Polymers, colloids, surfactants , Oxford University Press 2003
  • with Leonard Sander: Diffusion limited aggregation - a kinetic critical phenomenon , Physical Review Letters, Vol. 47, 1981, pp. 1400-1403
  • with Sander: Diffusion limited aggregation , Physical Review B, Vol. 27, 1983, p. 5686
  • with Sander: Fractal Growth , Scientific American, Vol. 256, 1987, pp. 94-100

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
personal data
SURNAME Witten, Thomas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Witten, Thomas Adams (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH August 24, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Raleigh , North Carolina