The Institute of Physics (IOP) today announces this year’s award winners with the Isaac Newton Medal, IOP’s international medal, going to theoretical condensed matter physicist Professor Leo Kadanoff (pictured) for his outstanding contributions to physics.
Professor Kadanoff is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Chicago, a distinguished research chair at the Perimeter Institute in Canada, and a former president of the American Physical Society. During his career he has worked on areas as diverse as superconductivity, phase transitions, urban growth and planning, and disorder, turbulence and chaos in physical systems.
On receipt of the award, Professor Kadanoff said, “I feel absolutely wonderful about it. It’s a recognition made all the more wonderful by hearing about the great people who received the prize before me.”
One review paper:
L. P. Kadanoff. Built upon sand: Theoretical ideas inspired by granular flows. Rev. Mod. Phys. 71(1999) 435-444.
Conclusions: Throughout this paper, our main question has been Can a granular material be described by hydrodynamic equations, most specifically those equations which apply
to an ordinary fluid? It seems to me that the answer is ‘‘no!’’ Glassy behavior is familiar, but it is not fully described by any simple set of partial differential equations.
It is also not fully understood. In fact, there are a rich variety of familiar but weakly understood Nonequilibrium problems. These range from plastic flow to crack propagation to charge density waves and to ordinary
and spin glasses. Granular materials form a particularly rich example of this kind of system, with behaviours which are, at this moment, not fully understood.
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