Rodney Baxter

Rodney James Baxter ( born February 8, 1940 in London) is an Australian mathematical physicist, known for his study exactly solvable lattice models of statistical mechanics.

Baxter studied until his bachelor's degree at Cambridge and at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he graduated in 1964 and received his doctorate. 1964/5 he worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company in London, was from 1968 to 1970 professor at MIT and then at the University of Canberra, where he was head of the Department of Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Advanced Study. He retired there in 2002. In 1992, he was Royal Society Research Professor at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge.

Baxter was known when he in 1971 with his "Star - Triangle Relation" (later Yang -Baxter equations) calculated the free energy of the 8 -vertex model. Before that, Lars Onsager in 1944, where his famous exact solution of the two-dimensional Ising model and Elliott H. Lieb in the 1960s the solution of other lattice models. Baxter's model contained these models ( for example, as a simplified objects of study of magnetic systems in solids serve ) as special cases. Baxter solved with similar methods, other two-dimensional models such as the 1980 "Hard Hexagon Model " and 1988, the chiral Potts model ( after Renfrey Potts ). His work he summarized in his classic work, "Exactly solvable models in statistical mechanics " ( Academic Press, London 1982). Named after him and Chen Ning Yang Yang -Baxter equation is later one of the starting points of the theory of quantum groups become ( by Vladimir Drinfeld and others) and is the fundamental identity, which is in many cases behind the exact solvability of models of statistical mechanics.

In 1980, he received the Boltzmann Medal, in 1984 an honorary doctorate from Cambridge, 1987 Dannie Heineman Prize and the 2006 Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society. Since 1977 he is a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences and he is since 1982 a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. In 2003 he received the Centenary Medal by the Australian government. In 1990 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto ( Hyperelliptic function parameterizing for the chiral Potts model). In 2013 he received the Royal Medal.