Gordon Baym

Alan Gordon Baym ( born July 1, 1935 in New York City ) is an American theoretical physicist.

Life and work

Baym studied at Cornell University (Bachelor 1957) and at Harvard University, Physics and Mathematics ( master's degree in mathematics at Harvard, 1957). In 1960 he received his doctorate at Harvard University with Julian Schwinger and then spent two year as a post- doctoral fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen (he was there and at the NORDITA later often as a visiting scientist, so 1970, 1976) and a year at the University of Berkeley. From 1963 he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign as an assistant professor and in 1968 full professor. He wrote a well-known in the U.S. quantum mechanics textbook. Baym was, inter alia, Visiting scientist in Kyoto (1968 ), Nagoya and Tokyo ( 2001), the Ecole Normale Superieure (1999) and the Academia Sinica (1979).

Baym dealt in particular with the behavior of matter under extreme conditions, eg in neutron stars (partly in collaboration with Hans Bethe, Pethick ) and heavy ion collisions ( Pionenkondensat, quark -gluon plasma). In this context, it was also much involved in the occurrence of the heavy ion accelerator RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He also dealt with many-body theory of nuclear physics and Bose -Einstein condensates.

He is since 1982 a member of the National Academy of Sciences (where he was Chairman of the Physics Section), the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2002 he received the Hans A. Bethe - Prize. In 2008 he was awarded the Lars Onsager - price with Christopher Pethick and Tin -Lun Ho 2011 him the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal was awarded.