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Frank Anthony Wilczek (born May 15, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and a Nobel laureate.[2] He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[3]
Wilczek, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.[4] He is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute.[5]
Born in Mineola, New York, of Polish and Italian origin, Wilczek was educated in the public schools of Queens, attending Martin Van Buren High School. It was around this time Wilczek's parents realized that he was exceptional - in part as a result of Frank Wilczek having been administered an IQ test.[6] He was raised Catholic.[7]
He received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1970, a Master of Arts in Mathematics at Princeton University, 1972, and a Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University in 1974.[8] Wilczek holds the Herman Feshbach Professorship of Physics at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was also a visiting professor at NORDITA.
He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 2002. Wilczek won the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society in 2003. In the same year he was awarded the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Commemorative Medal from Charles University in Prague. He was the co-recipient of the 2003 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society. Wilczek was also the co-recipient of the 2005 King Faisal International Prize for Science.
He currently serves on the board for Society for Science & the Public.
Wilczek was married to Betsy Devine on July 3, 1973, and together they have two daughters, Amity (Academic Dean at Deep Springs College) and Mira.
Wilczek is an agnostic.
Wilczek has also appeared on an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, where Penn referred to him as "the smartest person [they have] ever had on the show."
In 1973 Wilczek, a graduate student working with David Gross at Princeton University, discovered asymptotic freedom, which holds that "the closer quarks are to each other, the less the strong interaction (or color charge) between them"; when quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost as free particles. The theory, which was independently discovered by H. David Politzer, was important for the development of quantum chromodynamics.
Wilczek has helped reveal and develop axions, anyons, asymptotic freedom, the color superconducting phases of quark matter, and other aspects of quantum field theory. He has worked on an unusually wide range of topics, ranging across condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and particle physics.
In 2012 he proposed the idea of a space-time crystal.[9]
In his book The Lightness of Being (2009), he states that the Higgs boson does not explain the origin of mass.[10]
New York City, United States, American Civil War, Hawaii, Western United States
Logic, Set theory, Statistics, Number theory, Mathematical logic
Nobel Prize in Literature, Physics, Nobel Prize, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Peace Prize
New York City, Long Island, Albany, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania
Jerusalem, West Bank, Hebrew language, Tel Aviv, Syria
United States, Nobel Prize in Physics, United States Department of Energy, Princeton University, Israel
Albert Einstein, Amartya Sen, T. S. Eliot, Milton Friedman, Mario Vargas Llosa
Quantum mechanics, Standard Model, Condensed matter physics, Quantum electrodynamics, Quantum chromodynamics
Quantum field theory, Quantum electrodynamics, Standard Model, Particle physics, Proton