Barry M. McCoy

Barry Malcolm McCoy ( born December 14, 1940 in Trenton, New Jersey) is an American theoretical physicist.

McCoy earned his bachelor 's degree at Caltech in 1963 and his PhD in 1967 at Harvard University with Tai Tsun Wu ( "spin correlations of the two dimensional Ising model" ). Then he went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he was an Assistant Professor in 1969 and currently is Professor (since 1979 Distinguished Professor of Physics ). He was a visiting professor in Kyoto, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the Institute Henri Poincare in Paris.

McCoy worked at the Ising model ( critical behavior at edges, behavior in the magnetic field, the difference equations for the correlation functions ), quantum spin chains and other integrable models of statistical mechanics. He is one of the co-discoverer of the chiral Potts model. He was also involved in quantum field theory, fermion representation of conformal field theories, non-linear differential equations and Rogers - Ramanujan identities.

His discovery (1976, with Wu and others) that the correlation functions are ( from Painlevé - type) in the Ising model solutions of nonlinear differential equations, stood as a beginning for similar studies in other lattice models in the 1980s.

In 1999 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. In 1998 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin ( Rogers - Ramanujan identities: a century of progress from mathematics to physics with Alexander Berkovich ).