Herbert Spohn

Herbert Spohn ( born 1 November 1946) is a German mathematician and physicist, currently a professor of applied probability theory at the Technical University of Munich.

Life

Spohn studied physics with a minor in mathematics at the Technical University of Stuttgart and at the LMU in Munich, where he also gained his doctorate in 1975. As a post - graduate student he was at Yeshiva University and Rutgers University with Joel Lebowitz and at Princeton University with Elliott Lieb. In 1980 he qualified as a professor in the Department of Theoretical Physics also at LMU and was subsequently to 1983 Heisenberg Fellow of the DFG. From 1983 to 1998 he was Professor of Theoretical Solid State Physics at the LMU again. Since 1998 he has been Professor and Professor of Applied Probability Theory at the Technical University Munich. He completed research at the IHES (Paris), the IAS in Princeton and the ITP in Santa Barbara. He was also a visiting professor at Rutgers University.

2000 to 2002 he was president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics. In 2010 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad ( India) ( Weakly nonlinear wave equations with random initial data).

Work

Spohn is known for his work in the field of mathematical physics, applied probability theory and statistical physics. His work is motivated by questions from physics, particularly electrodynamics, quantum mechanics and also the crystal growth. Problems he illuminates, are especially many-body systems and their thermodynamic limiting cases, asymptotic expansions of these systems and the influence of random disturbances. He has published over 200 articles, but his mathematical work has been cited over a thousand times.

For his work he received in 1993, together with Joel Lebowitz the Max Planck Research Award, and the 2011 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. In the award were his fundamental contributions to statistical mechanics of non-equilibrium, for example, its exact solutions of growth models and stationary states of open systems, highlighted that illuminate the transition from microscopic to macroscopic behavior. Also in 2011 he received the Leonard Eisenbud Prize of the American Mathematical Society. For 2014, his Georg Cantor Medal was awarded.

Selected publications

  • Kinetic equations from Hamiltonian dynamics. In: Reviews of Modern Physics. Vol 52, 1980, pp. 569-615.
  • Joel L. Lebowitz: A Gallavotti -Cohen type fluctuation theorem for stochastic dynamics. In: Journal of Statistical Physics. Vol 95, 1999, pp. 333-365 ..
  • Michael Prähofer: Scale invariance of the PNG droplet and the Airy process. In: Journal of Statistical Physics. Vol 108, 2002, pp. 1071-1106.
  • Patrik L. Ferrari: Step fluctuations for a faceted crystal. In: Journal of Statistical Physics. Vol 113, 2003, pp. 1-46.
  • Gianluca Panati and Stefan Teufel: Effective dynamics for Bloch electrons. Peierls substitution and beyond. In: Communications in Mathematical Physics. Vol 242, 2003, pp. 547-578.
  • Dynamics of Charged Particles and Their Radiation Field. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004, ISBN 0-521-83697-2.
  • Volker Betz: A central limit theorem for Gibbs measures relative to Brownian motion. In: Probability Theory and Related Fields. Vol 131, 2005, pp. 459-478.
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