Kenneth G. Wilson

He died in Saco, Maine on June 15, 2013 at the age of 77. He was respectfully remembered by his colleagues.

In 1985, he was appointed as Cornell's Director of the Center for Theory and Simulation in Science and Engineering (now known as the Cornell Theory Center), one of five national supercomputer centers created by the National Science Foundation. In 1988, Wilson joined the faculty at Ohio State University. Wilson moved to Gray, Maine in 1995. He continued his association with Ohio State University until he retired in 2008. Prior to his death, he was actively involved in research on physics education and was an early proponent of "active involvement" (i.e. Science by Inquiry) of K-12 students in science and math.

In 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on critical phenomena using the renormalization group.

Wilson's brother David was also a professor at Cornell in the department of Molecular Biology and Genetics until his death, and his wife since 1982, Alison Brown, is a prominent computer scientist.

He was a co-winner of the Wolf Prize in physics in 1980, together with Michael E. Fisher and Leo Kadanoff. His other awards include the A.C. Eringen Medal, the Franklin Medal, the Boltzmann Medal, and the Dannie Heinemann Prize. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Science and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, both in 1975, and also was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984.

He joined Cornell University in 1963 in the Department of Physics as a junior faculty member, becoming a full professor in 1970. He also did research at SLAC during this period. In 1974, he became the James A. Weeks Professor of Physics at Cornell.

He went on to Harvard College at age 16, majoring in Mathematics and, on two occasions, in 1954 and 1956, ranked among the top five in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. He was also a star on the athletics track, representing Harvard in the Mile. During his summer holidays he worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He earned his PhD from Caltech in 1961, studying under Murray Gell-Mann. He did post-doc work at Harvard and CERN.

Kenneth Geddes "Ken" Wilson (June 8, 1936 – June 15, 2013) was an American theoretical physicist and a pioneer in leveraging computers for studying particle physics. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase transitions—illuminating the subtle essence of phenomena like melting ice and emerging magnetism. It was embodied in his fundamental work on the renormalization group.

Wilson was born on June 8, 1936, in Waltham, Massachusetts, the oldest child of Emily Buckingham Wilson and E. Bright Wilson, a prominent chemist at Harvard University, who did important work on microwave emissions. His mother also trained as a physicist. He attended several schools, including Magdalen College School, Oxford, England, ending up at the George School in eastern Pennsylvania.