John M. Blatt

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
John Markus Blatt
Born(1921-11-23)November 23, 1921
Vienna
DiedMarch 16, 1990(1990-03-16) (aged 68)
Haifa
CitizenshipAmerican
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics

John Markus Blatt (23 November 1921, Vienna – 16 March 1990, Haifa) was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist.

Life

Blatt was the son of a successful physician in Vienna. In 1938 the family immigrated to the US as Jews fleeing the

Illiac computer was being built. Blatt was involved in the project and became a pioneer in the use of computers in theoretical nuclear physics. During the McCarthy era, he was dissatisfied with the political climate in the United States and immigrated to Australia, where in 1953 he joined the faculty of the University of Sydney.[1] There, in collaboration with Max Robert Schafroth (1923–1959)[2] and Stuart Thomas Butler, he did important research on the theory of superconductivity.[1][3][4]

Blatt, Butler, and Schafroth rejected BCS for a number of years, offering an alternative in the summer of 1957. This "quasi-chemical approach" expanded on Schafroth's earlier theory of superconductivity as a Bose-Einstein condensation of pairs of electrons.[5]

Blatt's energetic and argumentative personality led to conflict at the University of Sydney, so in 1959 he became a professor of applied mathematics at the newly founded

FORTRAN programming, and, in collaboration with S. B. Butler, two introductory physics textbooks. During his career at the University of New South Wales, he dealt with the three-body nuclear problem, statistical mechanics and applied mathematics such as the theory of optimal control. He brought a number of important mathematicians to the university such as George Szekeres and ensured that computer science teaching was expanded and students were trained early on computers. In the later part of his career, he worked on mathematical economics.[6] He published over 100 articles.[1]

Blatt was an accomplished amateur pianist.[6]

Selected publications

Family

Blatt married Sylvia Epstein in 1945; they divorced in 1967. He married his second wife, Ruth, in 1971.[9] He and his second wife retired to Haifa in 1984. He remained scientifically active there and taught at the University of Haifa. From his first marriage, he had four children, two of whom became computer scientists.[6]

References

  1. ^
    doi:10.1063/1.2809506
    .
  2. ISSN 0028-0836. Max Robert Schafroth was a Swiss physicist and student and assistant of Wolfgang Pauli
    in Zürich. Schafroth immigrated to Australia and was killed in May 1959 in the crash of a small airplane.
  3. ^ Schafroth, M. R.; Butler, S. T.; Blatt, J. M. (1957). "Quasichemical equilibrium approach to superconductivity". Helvetica Physica Acta. 30: 93–134.
  4. ISBN 9789810217181. p. 135
  5. ISBN 9780195053296
    .
  6. ^ a b c Franklin, James (2001). "Profile of a Mathematician: John Blatt". Parabola. 37 (2): 15–17.
  7. ISSN 0036-8075. p. 420
  8. ^ In the series there are 6 volumes: volume 3 Sound and Wave motion by Butler; volume 4 Electricity and Magnetism by M. M. Winn; volume 5 Atomic Physics by Butler and Harry Messel; volume 6 Light and Optics by Butler und Messel
  9. ISBN 978-3-11-096854-5
    .
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_M._Blatt&oldid=1196818677"