Baym shares 2011 Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal

Professor of Physics and George and Anne Fisher Professor of Engineering Emeritus Gordon Baym will share the 2011 Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal for his contributions to many-body physics.

Baym was cited "for the self-consistent conserving approach to many-body perturbation theory that provided a solid platform for perturbative expansions, and for his novel applications of quantum many-body methods to nuclear physics, astrophysics, highly condensed matter, and atomic physics." He will receive the award at a special ceremony during the 16th Recent Progress in Many-Body Physics international conference in Bariloche, Argentina in late November.  

Also sharing the 2011 Medal is Leonid Keldysh, the former director of the Lebedev Physical Institute (Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow). He is now a professor of physics at Texas A&M University. Keldysh was recognized for his extension of many-body perturbation theory to non-equilibrium systems.

The Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal was established in 1983 by the many-body physics community to honor the enduring contributions of Eugene Feenberg to physics, especially to the foundations of nuclear physics and to microscopic quantum many-body physics of nuclei and quantum fluids. The medal is presented under the auspices of the International Advisory Committee for the RPMBT series of international conferences.

Baym is one of four Illinois physics faculty members to have received this prestigious international prize. Previous UI faculty recipients are David Pines (1985), David M. Ceperley (1994), and Anthony J. Leggett (1999). Physics Illinois alumnus Malvin Kalos was awarded the Feenberg Medal in 1989.

Baym received his bachelor's degree in physics from Cornell University in 1956, his AM in mathematics from Harvard in 1957, and his PhD in physics from Harvard in 1960. He joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in 1963.

An international leader in the study of matter under extreme conditions, Baym has made original, seminal contributions to our understanding of physical systems ranging from neutron stars and nuclei, quark-gluon plasmas, and ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions, to condensed matter physics, quantum fluids, and most recently, ultracold trapped atomic gases.

Baym is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He received the American Physical Society's Hans A. Bethe Prize in 2002 and the Lars Onsager Prize in 2008.
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Contact: Gordon Baym, Department of Physics.

Writer: Celia M. Elliott, Department of Physics, 217/244-7725.

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