Louis Witten

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Louis W. Witten
Born (1921-04-13) April 13, 1921 (age 102)
ThesisA Model of an Imperfect Gas
Doctoral advisorTheodore H. Berlin

Louis Witten (born April 13, 1921)[1] is an American theoretical physicist and the father of the physicist Edward Witten.

Witten's research has centered on classical

Einstein field equation. He edited a book[2] (see citation below) which contains papers by contributors such as ADM (Arnowitt, Deser, and Misner), Choquet-Bruhat, Ehlers and Kundt, Goldberg, and Pirani which are used by researchers after the passage of more than 40 years. His most recent paper was published in 2020.[3]

Early life and education

Louis Witten was born to a

US Army Air Forces as a Radar Weather Officer.[citation needed
]

He was a graduate student in physics at The Johns Hopkins University from 1948 to 1951 when he received the PhD degree. His dissertation, in statistical mechanics, was entitled "A Model of an Imperfect Gas". His thesis advisor was Theodore H. Berlin.[4] In 1949 he married Lorraine Wollach of Baltimore. They had four children, Edward, Celia, Matthew, and Jesse. Lorraine died in 1987. In 1992 he married Frances Lydia DeLange.

Academic career

After postdoctoral study at

Martin Marietta Corporation. In 1968 he became a Professor of Physics at the University of Cincinnati where he remained until his retirement in 1991. He is also emeritus at the University of Florida. Since 1968 he has been a Vice-President and Director of Science Affairs of the Gravity Research Foundation
.

He participated in a conference held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from January 18–23, 1957 "to discuss the role of gravitation in physics".[note 1]

Bibliography

  • Witten, Louis, ed. (1962). Gravitation: an Introduction to Current Research. New York: Wiley.
  • Carmeli, Moshe; Fickler, Stuart I.; Witten, Louis (1970). Relativity: Proceedings of the Relativity Conference in the Midwest, held at Cincinnati, Ohio, June 2-6, 1969. Boston, MA: Springer US.
    OCLC 840287501
    .
  • Esposito, F. Paul; Witten, Louis (1977). Asymptotic structure of space-time: [proceedings of a Symposium on Asymptotic Structure of Space-Time (SOASST), held at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, June 14-18, 1976]. New York: Plenum Press.
    OCLC 2798582
    .

Notes

References

  1. ^ ORAL HISTORIES: Louis Witten, interviewed by Dean Rickles and Donald Salisbury, at the American Institute of Physics; March 17, 2011; retrieved December 13, 2021
  2. ^ Witten, Louis (1962). Gravitation: An Introduction to Current Research. Wiley.
  3. S2CID 211146232
    .
  4. .
  5. .

Further reading