Sidney Dancoff

Sidney Michael Dancoff ( born September 27, 1913 in Philadelphia, † August 15 1951 in Urbana ( Illinois)) was an American theoretical physicist.

Dancoff his doctorate in 1939 with Robert Oppenheimer in Berkeley. In calculations of the radiative corrections to the scattering of a relativistic electron in an external Coulomb field in quantum electrodynamics, which he based on the work of this under Oppenheimer and Felix Bloch conducted, he developed "almost" the renormalization method. But he lacked a term, the Tomonaga in Japan in 1948 stimulated by Dancoffs work added. Together with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger, the ( however, were not directly affected by Dancoffs work) at the same time the renormalization theory developed, Tomonaga was awarded the Nobel Prize. From 1940 he was instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, where he worked with Robert Serber on the theory of nuclear forces. During the Second World War he worked from 1943 to 1945 on the theory of nuclear reactors in the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi had previously launched the first nuclear reactor up and running. The " Dancoff factor" that indicates the geometric shielding effect of fuel rods with each other, is named for him here .. 1941/2, he was a National Research Fellow and 1950 /1 as Guggenheim Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he Wolfgang Pauli collaborated on field theory of mesons. After the war he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign again, where in 1950 his most famous work was the introduction of the Tamm - Dancoff approximation in quantum field theory of mesons independently by Igor Tamm in Russia, who introduced it in 1945.

In the late 1940s he also worked with the biologists and radiologists Quastler Henry ( 1908-1963 ) on cybernetic area. Dancoffs law is named for him here: in biological systems occurs the largest growth at the maximum, with the survival arrange error rate of reproduction.

Dancoff, who was considered one of the most gifted theoretical physicists of his generation, died at only 37 years of cancer. He was married and had two daughters.

His doctoral Sidney Drell counts.

References

• Physicist ( 20th century)
• Americans
• Born in 1913
• Died in 1951
• Man