Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek coming to ASU
January 18, 2011Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek will be in residence January 18-28, 2011 as an Origins Project Distinguished Visiting Professor.
Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did when he was just 21 years old as a graduate student working with David Gross, with whom he shared the 2004 prize. Among his notable accomplishments and contributions to the scientific community are the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the exploration of new kinds of quantum statistics (anyons). Wilczek was the first permanent member of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics and has received numerous international awards. He received his BS from University of Chicago and his PhD from Princeton and is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT.
Wilczek, a theoretical physicist, is particularly interested in "pure" particle physics and the "application of insights from particle physics to cosmology, as well as the quantum theory of black holes. While at ASU, Wilczek will be spending time with ASU students and meeting with faculty from a number of different departments.