Elliott Waters Montroll

Elliott Waters Montroll ( born May 4, 1916 in Pittsburgh, † December 3, 1983 in Chevy Chase ( Maryland)) was an American theoretical physicist and mathematician.

Montroll has already impressed as a child of Chemistry and began his studies in chemistry in 1933 at the University of Pittsburgh, from which he graduated in 1937 as Bachelor. After that, he switched to mathematics and his PhD in 1939 in Pittsburgh with a thesis on the application of the theory of integral equations to the kinetic theory of gases ( "Some Notes and Applications of the characteristic value theory of integral equations "). After that, he was 1939/40, research assistant in chemistry at Columbia University, where he worked with Joseph Mayer on statistical mechanics of real gases, and 1940/1 Sterling Research Fellow at Yale University, where he worked on the Ising model. 1941/2 he was at Cornell University and has worked across the spectrum of elastic vibrations in crystal lattices, research which he continued in the 1950s. 1942/3 he was instructor of physics at Princeton University. In 1943 he became head of the mathematics research group of the Kellex Corporation in New York City, which developed programs for neutron kinetics in the context of the Manhattan Project. In 1944 he was at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn as Adjunct Professor of Chemistry. From 1946 he was back at the University of Pittsburgh, first as Assistant and Associate Professor, and finally with a full professorship in mathematics and physics. At the same time, he was from 1948 to 1950 Head of the Research Department of Physics at the Office of Naval Research. In 1950 he became a Research Fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, but in 1951 a research professor at the Institute of Hydrodynamics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Maryland. In 1960, he was Chief Scientist ( Director of General Sciences ) at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center of IBM. In 1963 he became vice president for research at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, DC. From 1966 until his retirement he was then " Albert Einstein Professor of Physics " and director of the Institute for Fundamental Studies at the University of Rochester. Even after his retirement in 1981, he was active in research at the University of Maryland and the University of California, Irvine.

Montroll worked mainly in statistical mechanics and stochastic problems (such as random walks on lattices ), whose methods he used on sociological and biological problems and in chemistry.

In 1969 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1973 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1959 he won the Prize of the Operations Lancaster Society of America for his work on traffic flows. Montroll was a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.

Montroll had ten children, among others, the origami specialist John Montroll ( of being able to additionally have the ability in five octaves whistle ).

Writings

• With G. Newell "Topics in statistical mechanics of interacting particles", University of Maryland, 1952
• Publisher: Fluctuation Phenomena, North Holland 1979
• Montroll Dynamics of evolution of some socio -technical systems, Bulletin AMS, Bd.16, 1987, p.1 -46