Benjamin Widom

Benjamin Widom (* 1927) is an American chemist and physicist who deals with statistical mechanics, and physical chemistry.

Life and work

Widom attended Stuyvesant High School in New York and then studied chemistry and physics ( among others, Hans Bethe, Mark Kac and Philip Morrison ) at Columbia University ( bachelor's degree 1949) and at Cornell University where in 1953 he at Simonbauer received his doctorate with a thesis on the transfer of vibrational energy in molecular collisions in gases. After a postdoctoral stay with Oscar K. Rice (1903-1978) in 1952 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he had already dealt with phase transitions, he was Instructor in 1954, 1955 and 1963, Assistant Professor, Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, where he has the Goldwin Smith professorship today. 1978 to 1981 he was chairman of the chemistry faculty at Cornell.

Widom is best known for his discovery of scaling behavior and relations between the critical exponents of phase transitions, for example, of liquids near the critical points in the 1960s, described fully later in the renormalization group theory of Kenneth Wilson. He also examined the phase equilibria and the behavior at phase boundaries ( such as surface tension, capillarity ).

Widom received the 1986 Dickson Prize in Science, 1998, the Boltzmann Medal, the Boris Pregel Award from the New York Academy of Sciences, the Langmuir and Hildebrand Award of the American Chemical Society, the Onsager Medal at the University of Trondheim, the Bakhus Roozeboom Medal of the Dutch Academy Tens of Sciences. He is since 1974 a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and since 1979 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and the University of Utrecht.

His brother Harold Widom was a math professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His son Michael Widom is Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Writings

• Statistical mechanics -a concise introduction for chemists, Cambridge University Press 2002
• John Shipley Rowlinson: Molecular theory of capillarity, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1989