Kenneth G. Wilson

Kenneth Geddes Wilson (born June 8, 1936) is an American theoretical physicist. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was a Putnam Fellow. He earned his PhD from Caltech in 1961, studying under Murray Gell-Mann. He joined Cornell University in 1963 in the Department of Physics as a junior faculty member, becoming a full professor in 1970. In 1974, he became the James A. Weeks Professor of Physics at Cornell. He was a co-winner of the Wolf Prize in p... more

Kenneth Geddes Wilson (born June 8, 1936) is an American theoretical physicist. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was a Putnam Fellow. He earned his PhD from Caltech in 1961, studying under Murray Gell-Mann. He joined Cornell University in 1963 in the Department of Physics as a junior faculty member, becoming a full professor in 1970. In 1974, he became the James A. Weeks Professor of Physics at Cornell. He was a co-winner of the Wolf Prize in physics in 1980, together with Michael E. Fisher and Leo Kadanoff. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his seminal approach, combining quantum field theory and the statistical theory of critical phenomena of second-order phase transitions, i.e., for his constructive theory of the renormalization group. In this theory he gave not only important, and even numerical, insights to the field of critical statics and dynamics in statistical physics, but indirectly also basic answers to the question: "What is quantum field theory?" and ... less