Bruria Kaufman

Bruria Kaufman ( born August 21, 1918 in New York City; † January 7, 2010 in Israel) was an Israeli theoretical physicist. She busied herself with general relativity theory and statistical physics. She is known primarily for its work on the two-dimensional Ising model.

Kaufman came in 1934 from the United States to Jerusalem. She studied physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received her bachelor's degree in 1938. She received her Ph.D. in 1948 at Columbia University in New York. From 1947 to 1955 she was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton worked, 1947/48 as an assistant to John von Neumann, and 1950 to 1955 as an assistant to Albert Einstein. In the following years, she worked at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, and from 1957 at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked on mathematical linguistics. In 1960 she returned to Israel, where she was Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot ( 1960-1971 ) and at the University of Haifa ( 1972-1988 ). Bruria Kaufman was married to the late 1992 linguists Zellig S. Harris. In 1996 she married the Nobel laureate Willis E. Lamb. Bruria Kaufman was a member of Kibbutz Mishmar haEmek. In 1993 she was a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona and Columbia University.

She worked on expanding the exact solution of the Ising model, the Lars Onsager in 1944 succeeded, some with Onsager itself. Your reach substantial simplifications of Onsagers solution by applied the physicists at that time familiar from the relativistic quantum theory of spinor analysis ( Onsager used in its original work elliptic functions and quaternions ). In their calculation of the correlation functions of the Ising model with Onsager they related Toeplitz matrices. As a mathematical assistant of Einstein, she worked in the 1950s with general relativity and the then studied by Einstein extension experiments .. In Israel, she worked among others with Harry Lipkin with the Mössbauer effect, with unitary symmetry for the harmonic oscillator, group theoretical treatment of special functions of mathematical physics.