Rolf Landauer

Rolf Wilhelm ( William) Landau ( born February 4, 1927 in Stuttgart, † 27 April 1999 in Briarcliff Manor, New York ) was a German - American physicist and information scientist.

1938 had Landauer, then 11 years old, leaving his family at that time Nazi Germany. He studied at Harvard University (Bachelor, 1945, Master 1947), where he received his doctorate in physics in 1950. 1950 to 1952 he was a physicist of the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics at the Lewis Laboratory. Since 1952 he was a physicist at IBM. 1961 to 1966 he was its director for physics and 1966-1969 Assistant Director of Research. From 1969, he was IBM Fellow.

Landau made ​​famous by the discovery of the eponymous Landauer principle, which the irreversible deletion of information assigns a specific energy loss and incidentally solves the dilemma of the Maxwell's demon. At the same time he showed that the reading and writing of information under ideal conditions is free from energy costs.

Prerequisite for this discovery was his belief that information can not be abstract, but inevitably a physical incarnation must have: "Information is physical ". By Landauer principle of thermodynamic entropy with the information-theoretic concept of entropy is directly linked for the first time. In this respect, the work of Landauer is of key significance for a number of other theories that build on this link.

Orly R. Shenker points out in an analysis of Landauer's theses from 2000 on their view, present several breakthroughs in the argument Landauer out, in their opinion, especially left behind lead to an unacceptable linkage of the concept of dissipation, both in information theory as thermodynamics is used. 2012 but managed a research group from Lyon, Kaiserslautern and Augsburg experimental confirmation of Landauer principle.

In 1995 he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize of the American Physical Society. Since 1988 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Works

  • Rolf Landauer, irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process, IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 5, pp. 183-191, 1961.
  • Rolf Landauer, The Physical Nature of Information, Physics Letters A 217 (1996): 188-193
April 27 Landauer's principle
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