Renfrey Potts
Renfrey " Ren " Burnard Potts ( born October 4, 1925 in Adelaide, † 9 August 2005 ) was an Australian mathematical and theoretical physicist and Applied mathematician, known for work in statistical mechanics and theory of traffic flows.
Potts went in Adelaide, where his father was a teacher, to school, studied from 1943 to 1947 at the University of Adelaide ( first engineering and then mathematics) and then from 1948 as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University (Queen 's College ), where he in 1951 Cyril Domb doctorate ( The Mathematical Investigation of Some Cooperative Phenomena ). After that, he was from 1951 to 1957 Lecturer at the University of Adelaide. 1955/56, he was a post-doc at the University of Maryland, and from 1957 to 1959 Associate Professor at the University of Toronto while he was at the same time 1958/59 Consultant at General Motors in Detroit, where he examined microscopic models for car traffic ( car Following models ). From 1959 until his retirement in 1990 he was Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaide, a then newly created Chair. He was there among other Head of the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics. In 1968 he received a Doctor of Science ( D.Sc. ), University of Oxford. From 1991 to 1993 he was a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore.
As an applied mathematician, he dealt early on with Operations Research (for which he 1959 Lanchester Prize) and especially analysis of traffic flows. Next he worked on robotics, network theory, differential and difference equations and matrix theory. He was also early with computers and co-founded the South Australian Computer Society, the forerunner of the Australian Computer Society, which he was Fellow (FACS). He has published about 90 research papers and was a popular teacher, who supervised twenty graduate students. He was in Australia a leader in applied mathematics and in mathematics education actively, for example, he organized the 5th International Conference on Mathematics Education in 1984 in Adelaide and 1988, the Mathematics Olympiad in Canberra.
From him the Potts model, a generalization of the Ising model is derived. It was introduced in 1952 by Potts ( as suggested by Cyril Domb ). It is defined on the two-dimensional grids or graphs, generally, with spins in the nodes can assume different discrete values q. The interaction energy is -J if the neighboring spins are equal, zero otherwise for q = 2 and a two-dimensional grid, it is equivalent to the Ising model without external field. There are only a few cases ( the Ising model as ) known exact solutions. At the critical point is also a solution known ( Temperley and Elliott Lieb and Australian Rodney Baxter in the 1970s ).
In 1991 he was Officer of the Order of Australia and in 2001 he was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal. In 1975 he became a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences and in 1983 the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering Science ( Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering ). In 1995, he was the first carrier of the coin of ANZIAM ( the Section of Applied Mathematics of the Australian Mathematical Society ). 1978/79 he was chairman of the Department of Applied Mathematics ( ANZIAM the precursor ) of the Australian Mathematical Society since 1994 and a Fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society.
He was married with a doctorate in physics and computer science professor Barbara Kidman in Adelaide since 1950 and had two daughters. In his spare time he was an active sportsman and played classical music (piano, clarinet ).