John Hasbrouck Van Vleck
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck ( born March 13, 1899 in Middletown, Connecticut, † October 27, 1980 in Cambridge ) was an American physicist who worked on solid state physics. Van Vleck was awarded in 1977 along with Nevill Mott and Philip W. Anderson Nobel Prize in Physics " for fundamental theoretical benefits to electronic structure in magnetic and disordered systems ". He was often called the father of the modern theory of magnetism. and was in the 1920s, a pioneer of quantum mechanics in the United States.
Life and work
Van Vleck came from a long-established in the U.S. since the 17th century originally Dutch family, his father Edward Burr Van Vleck ( 1863-1943 ) was from 1905 to professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and his grandfather John Monroe Van Vleck mathematics and astronomy professor Wesleyan University. He began his study of physics at the University of Wisconsin and then studied from 1920 at Harvard University, where in 1921 his Master's degree made in 1922 with Edwin Kemble ( one of the few theoretical physicists in the United States, which was then taught quantum theory ) received his doctorate, with a thesis on the helium atom in what is now called old Quantum theory. He then spent a year at Kemble Instructor and Assistant Professor in 1923 and later became a professor at the University of Minnesota. In 1928 he became a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison before becoming a professor of physics at Harvard University returned in 1934, where he remained scientifically active even after his retirement in 1969. 1943 to 1945 he headed the Harvard radar research group and 1945 to 1949 he was the Physics Faculty ago. 1951 to 1957 he was dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Physics from 1951 and Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy.
He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University (1927, 1934, 1941), at the University of Michigan ( 1933), Columbia University (1934 ), Princeton University (1937 ), the University of Leiden (as Lorentz Professor 1960) and Oxford University (1961 /62).
In 1935 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, 1965, he was awarded the Langmuir Award of the American Physical Society ( which he was president in 1952 ) and 1966 National Medal of Science. In 1974 he was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1970 and he became Knight of the Legion of Honour. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1963 he was the first winner of the Michelson Award from the Case Institute of Technology ( award lecture: American Physics comes of age ).
His nickname since his student days was Van. Since a prolonged illness bedridden in childhood he had a soft spot for train schedules, which he learned by heart thanks to an excellent memory.
His book Quantum Principles and Line Spectra from 1926 is still arrested the old quantum theory - he uses that time evolving quantum mechanics, however, in his second textbook Theory of Electric and Magnetic susceptibilities of 1932.
Among his doctoral students were Philip W. Anderson, Thomas S. Kuhn, Robert Serber and his students were John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.
Writings
- Quantum Principles and Line Spectra, Bulletin of the National Research Council, Volume 10, Part 4, No. 54, Washington DC 1926
- The Theory of Electric and Magnetic susceptibilities, Oxford University Press 1932 archives
- Quantum mechanics: The key to understanding magnetism, Science, Volume 201, 1978, p.113 -120 (Nobel Lecture, on the Nobel website Online )
- Models of exchange coupling in ferromagnetic magnetic media, Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 25, 1953, pp. 220-227
Memories:
- Travels with Dirac in the Rockies, in Salam, Wigner (Ed.) Aspects of Quantum Theory, Cambridge University Press 1972
- Reminiscences of the first decade of quantum mechanics, Int. J. Quant. Chemistry, Volume 5, 1971, p.3 -20
- Reminiscences of my scientific rapport with RS Mulliken, J. Phys. Chem, Volume 84, 1980, p 2091-95