Frank Wilczek

Frank Wilczek
Born	May 15, 1951 (1951-05-15) (age 58) Mineola, New York, U.S.
Nationality	United States
Ethnicity	Polish-Italian
Fields	Physics
Institutions	MIT
Alma mater	University of Chicago Princeton University
Doctoral advisor	David Gross
Doctoral students	Mark Alford (*) Michael Forbes Martin Greiter Christoph Holzhey David Kessler Finn Larsen Richard MacKenzie John March-Russell (*) Chetan Nayak Maulik Parikh Krishna Rajagopal David Robertson Sean Robinson Alfred Shapere Stephen Wandzura (*): Jointly a Sidney Coleman student
Known for	Quantum chromodynamics
Notable awards	Lorentz Medal (2002) Nobel Prize in Physics (2004)

Frank Anthony Wilczek (born May 15, 1951) is a theoretical physicist from the United States and a Nobel laureate. He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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.

Biography

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.

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. 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 in Santa Barbara.

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 have two daughters, Amity and Mira.

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."

Research

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 to 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.

Current research

• "Pure" particle physics: connections between theoretical ideas and observable phenomena;
• Behavior of matter: phase structure of quark matter at ultra-high temperature and density; color superconductivity;
• Application of particle physics to cosmology;
• Application of field theory techniques to condensed matter physics;
• Quantum theory of black holes.

Publications

For lay readers

• 2008. The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465003211.
• 2007. La musica del vuoto. Roma: Di Renzo Editore.
• 2006. Fantastic Realities: 49 Mind Journeys And a Trip to Stockholm. World Scientific. ISBN 978-9812566553.
• 2002, "On the world's numerical recipe(an ode to physics)," Daedalus 131(1): 142-47.
• 1989 (with Betsy Devine). Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics. W W Norton. ISBN 978-0393305968.

Technical

• 1988. Geometric Phases in Physics.
• 1990. Fractional Statistics and Anyon Superconductivity.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Frank Wilczek

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Frank Wilczek

• coupling unification
• Quantum chromodynamics
• black holes
• axion
• dark matter
• WIMP
• quantum number
• soliton
• fractional statistics
• Hall effect
• MIT Physics Department
• List of Poles

References

• "Frank Wilczek, Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics". Center for Theoretical Physics, MIT. 2008. http://web.mit.edu/physics/facultyandstaff/faculty/frank_wilczek.html. Retrieved 2008-04-30. 
• Tore Frängsmyr, editor (2005). "location=Stockholm The Nobel Prizes 2004". Les Prix Nobel. Nobel Foundation. http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/2004/wilczek-autobio.html location=Stockholm. Retrieved 2008-04-30. 

External links

• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• Longer biography at Lifeboat Foundation website
• Papers in ArXiv
• The World's Numerical Recipe
• Scientific articles by Wilczek in the SLAC database
• Wilczek on anyons and superconductivity
• Blog of the Wilczek family's Nobel adventures
• Interview on Books and Ideas Podcast (10/08)
• Freeman Dyson, "Leaping into the Grand Unknown: Review of The Lightness of Being," The New York Review of Books 56(6), April 9, 2009.
• ForaTV: The Large Hadron Collider and Unified Field Theory