Leo Kadanoff

Leo Philip Kadanoff (January 14, 1937 – October 26, 2015) was an American

In 1969 he moved to Brown University. He exploited mathematical analogies between solid state physics and urban growth to shed insights into the latter field, so much so that he contributed substantially to the statewide planning program in Rhode Island. In 1978 he moved to the University of Chicago, where he became the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor of Physics and Mathematics. Much of his work in the second half of his career involved contributions to chaos theory, in both mechanical and fluid systems. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982.^[6]

He was one of the recipients of the 1999

With Leo Irakliotis, Kadanoff established the Center for Presentation of Science at the University of Chicago.

In June 2013, it was stated that anonymous donors had provided a $3.5 million gift to establish the Leo Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Chicago.^[9] He died after complications from an illness on October 26, 2015.^[10] In 2018 the American Physical Society established the Leo P. Kadanoff Prize in his honor.

Publications (selection)

• "Scaling laws for Ising models near ${\displaystyle T_{c}}$", Physics 2(263), 1966. (The seminal paper for the development of renormalization group theory; see
  History of renormalization group theory
  .)
• "Operator Algebra and the Determination of Critical Indices", Phys. Rev. Lett. 23(1430), 1969. (The seminal paper for the development of conformal field theory; see
  History of conformal field theory
  .)

References