Barry Simon

Barry M. Simon ( born April 16, 1946 in New York City ) is a leading American mathematical physicist and analyst.

Life and work

Simon's father was an accountant and his mother a teacher. In 1962, he won as a high school student in Brooklyn a statewide mathematics test of the MAA ( Mathematical Association of America ) and has already visited as a student classes for gifted children at Columbia University. In 1962 he began to study at Harvard with a scholarship. In 1965, he was 19 years old Putnam Fellow ( after he had won the competition of the same name ) and graduated (AB) at Harvard in 1966. It was established in 1970 received his doctorate at Princeton at Arthur Strong Wightman about Quantum mechanics for Hamiltonians defined as quadratic forms, the short it also appeared as a book. Simon was then long -time professor at Princeton ( where Wightman, Valentine Bargmann, Freeman Dyson and Elliott Lieb at the time were that made the world with Simon Princeton one of the centers of mathematical physics ) before 1980 as Simon Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech went where he became Professor in 1981 and is since 1984 " IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics".

Simon is the author of over 300 publications on a wide range of mathematical physics and analysis, especially the theory of the spectrum of Schrödinger operators with applications to atoms and molecules, atoms in electric and magnetic fields, the convergence of perturbation series and semi classical safe border crossing, stochastic systems (eg Schrödinger equation with quasi-periodic or random potentials, random matrices ), Thomas - Fermi and Hartree- Fock theory of atoms ( partially in collaboration with Elliott Lieb, his colleague at Princeton in the 1970s ) and many-body systems in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, mathematical statistical mechanics ( theory of phase transitions, etc.), orthogonal polynomials, and mathematical ( "constructive " ) quantum field theory. His four-volume textbook of mathematical physics with Michael Reed is a standard work.

He is married to a math teacher since 1971 and has five children. As an Orthodox Jew, he is also known for his involvement in the refutation of so-called "Torah Codes". By Woody Leonhard he also wrote several computer books for young people ( "Mother of All" series).

In 1974 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver ( approximation of Feynman integrals and Markov fields by spin systems). In 2012 he received the Henri Poincaré Prize. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

His doctoral include Percy Deift and Robert Israel.

Books by Simon

  • Quantum theory of Hamiltonians defined by quadratic forms. Princeton 1971
  • The Euclidean Quantum Field Theory. Princeton 1974
  • Trace ideals and their applications. Cambridge 1979, 2nd ed AMS 2005
  • Functional integration and quantum physics. Academic Press 1979, 2nd edition AMS Chelsea Publishing 2005
  • Convexity. An analytic viewpoint. Cambridge University Press 2011
  • Statistical mechanics of lattices gases. Vol.1, Princeton 1993
  • Michael C. Reed: Methods of Modern Mathematical Physics. Vol.1: Functional Analysis. Academic Press, 1972, 2nd edition 1980; Vol.2: Fourier Analysis, Self - Adjointness. Academic Press, 1975; Vol.3: Scattering Theory. Academic Press, 1978; Volume 4: Analysis of Operators. Academic Press, 1977
  • With H. Cycon, R. Froese, W. Kirsch: Schrödinger operator. Springer, 1987, 2nd edition 2008, ISBN 978-3-540-16758-7.
  • Orthogonal polynomials on the unit circle ", 2 vols, AMS Colloquium publications
  • Publisher with Lieb, Wightman: Studies in mathematical physics. Princeton 1976 ( Bargmann Festschrift ), in Simon: On the number of bound states of Schrödinger operators body two, a review and quantum dynamics: from automorphism to Hamiltonian.
Harvard University Arthur Wightman Mathematics Genealogy Project Integrated Authority File
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