Dietrich Stauffer (6 February 1943 – 6 August 2019) was a German professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cologne. He is known in particular for his work on percolation theory, cellular automata and computational physics.

Life and work

Stauffer was born in Bonn in 1943, one of the four children of theologian

Ethelbert Stauffer Ethelbert Stauffer (May 8, 1902 in Friedelsheim – August 1, 1979 in Erlangen) was a German Protestant theologian and numismatist. Life Stauffer was the son of a Mennonite preacher born and raised in Worms. After attending the local grammar schoo ...

. He studied physics in Munich, gaining a

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in 1970 with a thesis on phase transitions and the superfluidity of helium. He then did post-doctoral work in the United States on phase transitions and

nucleation In thermodynamics, nucleation is the first step in the formation of either a new thermodynamic phase or structure via self-assembly or self-organization within a substance or mixture. Nucleation is typically defined to be the process that deter ...

before returning to Germany to work with Kurt Binder at Saarland University. In 1975 he became eligible for a professorship on completion of his

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...

. Two years later he was appointed associate professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cologne, where he remained for the rest of his career. During the 1970s Stauffer carried out research on percolation theory, publishing a review in '' Physics Reports'' in 1979, followed by a book ''An introduction to percolation theory'' in 1985, which would become his most-cited work. An expanded version, co-authored with

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, came out in 1992. In 1989 he was one of the founding directors of the supercomputer centre set up at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, where one of his main areas of research was cellular automata. In the 1990s he pioneered econophysics and

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, publishing the book ''Evolution, Money, War and Computers'' with Brazilian colleagues. Stauffer published 620 articles and six books, as well as editing the ''Annual Reviews of Computational Physics'' and serving as a member of the editorial board of a number of journals. He was a visiting professor at several universities including St. Francis Xavier University in Canada, and universities in Niteroi, Brazil, and Paris and Marseille in France. Awards included the

Gay-Lussac–Humboldt Prize The Gay-Lussac–Humboldt Prize is German–French science prize. It was created in 1981 by French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt based on the recommendation of the German and French research ministries. ...

(1992) and the Gentner-Kastler prize (1999). Following his retirement in 2008, Stauffer pursued an interest in history, attending lectures at the University of Cologne. He died in August 2019.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stauffer, Dietrich 1943 births 2019 deaths German theoretical physicists German physicists People from Bonn Academic staff of the University of Cologne