Nityananda, Rajaram
(2017)
Classics: Kenneth G. Wilson biographical.
Resonance: Journal of Science Education, 22 (1).
pp. 95-97.
ISSN 0973-712X
Abstract
The Nobel Foundation brings out short biographical sketches of its prize winners. The
material reproduced in this Classics section appears on the website of the Foundation
(http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel prizes/physics/laureates/1982/wilson-bio.html). This autobiography
was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later
edited and republished in Nobel Lectures, Physics 1981–1990 (World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore,
1993).
One point about Kenneth Wilson’s background is worth making. Many of the great figures of 20th-century
science from the United States whom we have covered in Resonance came from small town, non-academic
backgrounds. Kenneth Wilson is a notable exception. His father, E Bright Wilson, was a student of the great
Linus Pauling, a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard and later a professor at the same university.
His name is well known to generations of physicists and chemists via two books – Introduction to Quantum
Mechanics by Pauling and Wilson, and Molecular Vibrations by Wilson, Decius, and Cross.
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