Kenneth G. Wilson

In 1975 he met Alison Brown who was working for Cornell Computer Services. They got married in 1982.

He died at Saco, Maine, U.S. on June 15 from lymphoma complications. He was 77.

Wilson was born in 1936 in Waltham, Massachusetts. His father, E. Bright Wilson Jr. was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department at Harvard University. His mother Emily Buckingham Wilson had done one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage.

His maternal grandfather was a professor of mechanical engineering at the ‘Massachusetts Institute of Technology’ while his paternal grandfather was a lawyer, and one time Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

He completed his schooling in Wellesley, Woods Hole, Massachusetts (second, third/fourth grades in two years), Shady Hill School in Cambridge (from fifth to eighth grade), ninth grade at the Magdalen College School in Oxford, England, and tenth and twelfth grades (skipping the eleventh) at the George School in eastern Pennsylvania.

Before the year in England, he learned the basic principle of calculus from the book ‘Mathematics and Imagination’ by Kasner and Newman, and went on to work through a calculus text.

Around this time he decided to become a physicist. In 1952 he entered Harvard. He majored in mathematics, but studied physics. During his Harvard stint he participated in the ‘Putnam Mathematics competition’.

In 1962, Wilson joined CERN for a year, first for his Junior Fellowship and then as a ‘Ford Foundation Fellow’.

In September of 1963, he came to ‘Cornell University’ as an Assistant Professor. He was then promoted as an Associate Professor in 1965 and in 1971 he became a Full Professor. In 1974, he became ‘the James A. Weeks’ Professor at the University. He remained at Cornell ever since.

During 1969 - 70 he worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center,

In 1972 he worked at the ‘Institute for Advanced Study’ in Princeton, then in 1976 at the ‘California Institute of Technology’ as a ‘Fairchild Scholar’, and in 1979 - 80 at the ‘IBM Zürich Laboratory’.

Together with Douglas Von Houweling, then ‘Director of Academic Computing’ and Geoffrey Chester of the Physics Department, Wilson initiated a computing support project based on a ‘Floating Point Systems Array Processor’.

His work in physics involved formulation of a comprehensive theory of scaling: how fundamental properties and forces of a system vary depending on the scale over which they are measured.

Wilson’s Nobel Prize-winning research stemmed from work on phase transitions by Michael Fisher and Benjamin Widom at Cornell and Leo Kadanoff at the ‘University of Illinois’. Their findings motivated Wilson to ask whether his own work on quantum fields would be amenable to a similar approach, for all of these phenomena involve huge numbers of variables describing a wide range of length scales.

Following this work on phase transitions, Wilson turned again to quantum field theory and quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the newly proposed theory that protons, neutrons and other subatomic particles are composed of smaller particles called quarks. He created a version of QCD on a space-time lattice that made it possible for the first time to analyze the very strong forces that bind quarks together.