John M. Greene

John Morgan Greene ( born September 22, 1928 in Pittsburgh, † October 22, 2007 in San Diego ) was an American theoretical physicist and applied mathematician, known for his work on the theory of solitons and contributions to plasma physics.

Greene's father was a professor of chemical engineering at Kansas State College. He studied with an after repeated victory in the national mathematics competitions of the State of Kansas granted scholarship from Pepsi -Cola at Caltech ( bachelor's degree 1950) and in 1956 received his doctorate at the University of Rochester in Nuclear Physics. After that, he was a physics laboratory at Princeton University ( initially Project Matterhorn ), where he was one of the leading theoretical physicists and remained until 1982 in the plasma. From 1982 he was a Senior Technical Adviser in the theory group at General Atomics and simultaneously an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, San Diego. He died from the effects of Parkinson's disease.

He wrote a series of works in collaboration with John Johnson and Katherine Weimer on the balance and the instability of the tokamak and stellarator plasmas in the MHD. With Johnson and Ray Grimm, he developed the special computer code PEST ( Princeton equlibrium and Stability in tokamaks code). With Bruno Coppi and others, he examined dissipative instabilities. With Ira Bernstein and Martin Kruskal he led in 1957 BKG fashions a (nonlinear wave solutions in plasma physics ).

In 2006 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize by Martin Kruskal, Miura and Robert Clifford Gardner for her work on the inverse scattering transform method in the theory of solitons.

In the 1970s he focused on Hamiltonian dynamics in chaos theory ( Greene's criterion of the collapse of tori in the KAM theory, 1979).

He was married in 1956 and had a daughter.

In 1992 he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS ) and the American Geophysical Union.