David P. Landau (born June 22, 1941) is Distinguished Research Professor of Physics and founding Director of the Center for Simulational Physics at the
University of Georgia
, mottoeng = "To teach, to serve, and to inquire into the nature of things.""To serve" was later added to the motto without changing the seal; the Latin motto directly translates as "To teach and to inquire into the nature of things."
, establ ...
. In 1967, he received his PhD at Yale University under the direction of Werner P. Wolf. Two years later, he moved to the University of Georgia. Although intending to continue experimental research, he instead initiated high quality Monte Carlo studies of
phase transitions
In chemistry, thermodynamics, and other related fields, a phase transition (or phase change) is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states of ...
. He is a Fellow of the
American Physical Society. He won the
Aneesur Rahman
Aneesur Rahman (24 August 1927 – 6 June 1987) pioneered the application of computational methods to physical systems. His 1964 paper on liquid argon studied a system of 864 argon atoms on a CDC 3600 computer, using a Lennard-Jones potentia ...
Prize for Computational Physics, the highest award in computational physics given by the American Physical Society. In 2016, he received the
doctor honoris causa degree from the
Federal University of Minas Gerais
The Federal University of Minas Gerais ( pt, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, UFMG) is a federalIn the Brazilian Higher Education context, ''Federal'' does not mean ''collegiate'' (even though most Federal Universities in Brazil enjoy a sim ...
.
Awards
* Fellow of the American Physical Society
* Fellow of the Japan Society for Promotion of Science
* 1987 Jesse W. Beams Award from the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society
* 1988 Senior U.S. Scientist Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
* 2002 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society
* 2008 Nicholson Medal for Human Outreach from the American Physical Society
March Meeting Prize and Award Recipients, 2008
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See also
* Wang and Landau algorithm The Wang and Landau algorithm, proposed by Fugao Wang and David P. Landau, is a Monte Carlo method designed to estimate the density of states of a system. The method performs a non-Markovian random walk to build the density of states by quickly v ...
Notes
References
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External links
Homepage at University of Georgia
University of Georgia faculty
21st-century American physicists
Living people
1941 births
Fellows of the American Physical Society
Computational physicists
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