E.G.D. Cohen

Ezekiel Godert David Cohen, quoted as E.G.D. Cohen, (born 16 January 1923 in the Netherlands ) is an American theoretical physicist who deals with statistical physics.

Life and work

Cohen studied in Amsterdam, where he earned his doctorate under Jan Hendrik de Boer, 1957 ( On the theory of the liquid state) and was a lecturer. He then spent two years as a postdoc in the U.S. at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with George Uhlenbeck and Theodore H. Berlin. Since 1963 he has been Professor at the Rockefeller University in New York City, now a professor emeritus.

Cohen dealt among other things with the Boltzmann equation and the kinetic theory of dense gases and liquids. He showed in the 1960s with J. Robert Dorfman, that an expansion of the Boltzmann equation for gases of high density as a power series expansion in the density is not possible .. Its later experimentally confirmed prediction of incomplete phase separation of superfluous helium led to the development of a new cooling principle at low temperatures for very low temperatures (helium dilution refrigerator ).

From the 1990s he worked, inter alia, to with lattice gases ( where he discovered new types of diffusion, which can not be described are conventional methods ), new microscopic description method for the dynamics of nanoparticles and stationary nonequilibrium states of liquids ( related to the transport coefficients with Lyapunov exponents ).

In 2004 he received the Boltzmann Medal with Eugene Stanley for his ( so the price appreciation ) seminal contributions to statistical mechanics of non-equilibrium, especially for a theory of transport phenomena in dense gases and the characterization of stationary states in the nonequilibrium case and its fluctuations. Cohen is a Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

He is the editor of a series of anthologies Fundamental Problems of Statistical Mechanics (6 volumes) that emerged from the summer schools in the Netherlands in 1951.

For reviews, see Cohen

  • Publisher Statistical mechanics at the turn of the decade, Dekker 1971 ( Festschrift for the 70th birthday of Uhlenbeck ), in his essay: The generalization of the Boltzmann equation to higher Densities
  • With Walter Thirring (Editor) The Boltzmann Equation, Vienna 1973
  • The kinetic theory of dense gases, in Cohen (Editor) fundamental problems of statistical mechanics, Vol.2, North Holland 1968
  • Kinetic approach to non equilibrium phenomena, physicists in Mehra The concept of nature, Reidel 1973
  • The kinetic theory of fluids - an introduction, Physics Today, January 1984
  • Kinetic theory - understanding nature through collisions, American Journal of Physics, Bd.60, 1993, S.524
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